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Theories of Social Remembering

• Why does collective memory matter?

• How is social memory generated, maintained and reproduced?

• How do we explain changes in the content and role of
collective memory?

Through a synthesis of old and new theories of social
remembering, this book provides the first comprehensive overview
of the sociology of memory. This rapidly expanding field explores
how representations of the past are generated, maintained and
reproduced through texts, images, sites, rituals and experiences. The
main aim of the book is to show to what extent the investigation
of memory challenges sociological understandings of the formation
of social identities and conflicts. It illustrates the new status of
memory in contemporary societies by examining the complex
relationships between memory and commemoration, memory and
identity, memory and trauma, and memory and justice.

The book consists of six chapters, with the first three devoted to
conceptualizing the process of remembering by analysing memory’s
function, status and history, and by locating the study of memory in
a broader field of social science. The second part of the book
directly explores and discusses theories and studies of social
remembering. The glossary offers a concise and up-to-date
overview of the development of relevant theoretical concepts.

This is an essential text for undergraduate courses in social theory
and the sociology of memory, as well as a wider audience in
cultural studies, history and politics.

Barbara A. Misztal is Professor of Sociology at the University of
Leicester. She received her PhD from the Polish Academy of
Sciences (PAN). She worked at the Institute of Philosophy and
Sociology of PAN, Warsaw and Griffith University, Australia,
teaching social science, politics and European studies. She is the
author of Trust in Modern Society and Informality: Social Theory and
Contemporary Practice, and co-editor of Action on AIDS.

Cover design: Barker/Hilsdon

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ISBN 0-335-20832-0

9 780335 208326

Theories of Social Remembering Barbara A. Misztal

Theorizing Society

Theories of Social
Remembering

THEORIES OF SOCIAL
REMEMBERING

THEORIZING SOCIETY

Series editor: Larry Ray

Published and forthcoming titles:

Mary Evans: Gender and Social Theory

Barbara Misztal: Theories of Social Remembering

Roland Robertson and David Inglis: Globalization and Social Theory

Barry Smart: Economy, Culture and Society

THEORIES OF SOCIAL
REMEMBERING

Barbara A. Misztal

Open University Press

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First Published 2003

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In memory of my mother

CONTENTS

Series editor's foreword ix

Introduction 1

The outline of the book 6

Further reading

Olick, J.K. and Robbins, J. (1998) Social memory studies, Annual Review of
Sociology, 24(1): 105-41.

Zelizer, B. (1995) Reading the past against the grain, Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 12: 214-39.

Zerubavel, E. (1997) Social Mindscape: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology.
Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER I

MEMORY EXPERIENCE

The forms and functions of memory

r . . . whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into

memory’

(Milosz 2001)

Human ability to retain and recollect a fact, event, or person from memory
has been a topic of considerable interest to both scientists and artists for
a long time. Yet, taking into account varieties of personal remembering
(ranging from remembering an emotional feeling, through remembering
where I left my car keys, or how to run the spelling check on my computer,
or the date of the Battle of Hastings or how my daughter looks), it seems
almost impossible to find a common underlying conceptualization of the
process. Moreover, as its task involves summarizing, condensing or rewrit-
ing past events, memory is a complex but fallible system of storing informa-
tion (Baddeley 1989: 51). Because of this difficulty in analysing memory we
should view this faculty as some kind of active orientation towards the past,
as an act of ‘thinking of things in their absence’ (Warnock 1987: 12). By
referring to the process of remembering as ‘memory experience’ (Warnock
1987), we focus on the uniqueness of memory as a ‘dialogue with the past’
(Benjamin quoted in Lash 1999).

Memory has many forms and operates on many different levels, and the
things that we remember are of many different kinds and are remembered
for many different reasons. For example, there is the memory of how to ride
a bicycle, which has been defined as a procedural memory; there is also
the memory of such facts as that bicycles have two wheels and sometimes
a bell, which has been defined as a declarative or semantic memory
(Baddeley 1989: 35-46). Another type of memory is personal memory or

1 0 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

autobiographical memory, which is the way we tell others and ourselves the
story of our lives. Although autobiographical memories are not necessarily
accurate, they are ‘mostly congruent with one’s self knowledge, life themes,
or sense of self’ (Barclay and DeCooke 1988: 92). When talking about
cognitive memory, we refer to remembering the meaning of words and lines
of verse: ‘What this type of remembering requires is, not that the object of
memory be something that is past, but that the person who remembers that
thing must have met, experienced or learned of it in the past’ (Connerton
1989: 23). Yet another kind of memory is habit memory, which refers to our
capacity to reproduce a certain performance and which is an essential
ingredient in the successful and convincing performance of codes and rules.
Habit is the mode of inscribing the past in the present, as present. In this
case, memory denotes a habitual knowing that allows us to recall the signs
and skills we use in everyday life. This kind of memory, like all habits,
is sedimented in bodily postures, activities, techniques and gestures. Such
conceptualization of the process of remembering, where memory ‘gets
passed on in non-textual and non-cognitive ways’ (Connerton 1989: 102),
allows us to study social remembrance by focusing on the performance of
commemorative rituals.

Habit-memory differs from other types of memory because it brings the
past into the present by acting, while other kinds of memory retrieve the past
to the present by summoning the past as past - that is, by remembering it.
Remembering submits the past to a reflective awareness and it permits, by
highlighting the past’s difference to the present, the emergence of a form of
critical reflection and the formation of meaningful narrative sequences.
Although remembering, like habit, can be seen as a constant effort to main-
tain and reconstruct societal stability it, unlike habit, is also a ‘highly active,
effortful process’ (Young 1988: 97). While remembering, we deliberately
and consciously recover the past, so whatever memories ‘route into con-
sciousness, they need to be organized into patterns so that they make some
kind of continuing sense in an ever-changing present’ (Young 1988: 97-8).
Hence, memory, as the knowing ordering or the narrative organization of
the past, observes rules and conventions of narrative. For example, success-
ful narratives about the past must have a beginning and an end, an interest-
ing storyline and impressive heroes. The fact that memorizing is not free of
social constraints and influences suggests the importance of another type of
memory - namely, collective or social memory, which is our main concern
here.

This book focuses on similarities between the ways in which people assign
meanings to their common memories, while adopting the intersubjectivist
approach which allows us to avoid both theories rooted in social determin-
ism (which subordinate individuals totally to a collectivity) and visions of an
individualistic, atomized social order (which deny the importance of com-
municative relations between people and their social embeddedness). Its

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 1 1

main assumption is that remembering, while being constructed from cul-
tural forms and constrained by our social context, is an individual mental
act. Therefore, our intersubjectivist explanation of how we remember also
acknowledges that - despite the fact memory is socially organized and medi-
ated - individual memory is never totally conventionalized and standard-
ized. The memories of people who have experienced a common event are
never identical because in each of them a concrete memory evokes different
associations and feelings. The relation between collective and individual
memory can be compared to the relation between language ( langue )
and speech (parole), as formulated by Saussure (Funkenstein 1993: 5-9).
Language, as a collective product, is separated from the variety of uses to
which particular speech acts may be put; thus it is, like collective memory,
an idealized system. Variations in individual memories, which can be com-
pared to the scope of freedom with which we use language in particular
speech, reflect the degree to which a given culture permits conscious changes
and variations of the narrator in the contents, symbols and structures of
collective memory.

Underscoring the intersubjectivity of memory, the sociology of memory
asserts that the collective memory of a group is ‘quite different from the sum
total of the personal recollections of its various individual members, as it
includes only those that are commonly shared by all of them’ (Zerubavel
1997: 96). The collective memory, as the integration of various different
personal pasts into a single common past that all members of a community
come to remember collectively, can be illustrated by America’s collective
memory of the Vietnam War, that is more ‘than just an aggregate of all the
war-related recollections of individual Americans’ (Zerubavel 1997: 96).
Moreover, the prominent place of the Vietnam War (rather than, for
example, the Korean War) in the memories of Americans also suggests that
the division of the past into ‘memorable’ and ‘forgettable’ is a social conven-
tion, as it is society that ensures what we remember, and how and when we
remember it.

Memory is social because every memory exists through its relation with
what has been shared with others: language, symbols, events, and social and
cultural contexts. Much research illustrates that memory is intersubjectively
constituted because it is based on language and on an external or internal
linguistic communication with significant others (Paez etal. 1997: 155). The
way we remember is determined through the supra-individual cultural
construction of language, which in itself is the condition of the sharing of
memory, as a memory ‘can be social only if it is capable of being transmitted
and to be transmitted, a memory must first be articulated’ (Fentress and
Wickham 1992: 47). As the past is made into story, memories are simplified
and ‘prepared, planned and rehearsed socially and individually’ (Schudson
1995: 359). Any retrospective narratives’ chance of entering the public
domain is socially structured: ‘Within the public domain, not only the

1 2 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

recording of the past but active re-working of the past is more likely to be
transmitted if it happens in high-prestige, socially consensual institutions
than if it happens at or beyond the edges of conventional organization’
(Schudson 1995: 359). That remembering is social in origin and influenced
by the dominant discourses is well illustrated by Zerubavel’s (1997: 12)
example of cognitive battles over memory, which are typically between
social ‘camps’ rather than simply between individuals. The fact that major
changes in the way we view the past usually correspond to major social
transformations that affect entire mnemonic communities, as shown in
many studies of changes in attitudes to the past in postcommunist countries
after the collapse of communism (Szacka 1997), also provides the evidence
that remembering is more than just a personal act and the nature of political
power can influence the content of our memories.

Memory is also social because remembering does not take place in a social
vacuum. We remember as members of social groups, and this means assum-
ing and internalizing the common traditions and social representation
shared by our collectivities. Memory cannot be removed from its social
context, since whenever we remember something - for example, our first day
at university - we also recall the social circumstances in which the event took
place: the city, the university, friends and so on. Moreover, collective mem-
ory constitutes shared social frameworks of individual recollections as we
share our memories with some people and not others, and - in turn - with
whom, for what purpose and when we remember, all of which contributes to
what we remember. Furthermore, memory is social because the act of
remembering is itself interactive, promoted by cultural artefacts and cues
employed for social purposes and even enacted by cooperative activity
(Schudson 1997).

In today’s societies, which ‘are no longer societies of memory’ (Hervieu-
Leger 2000: 123), social memory refers not so much to living memory but to
organized cultural practices supplying ways of understanding the world, and
providing people with beliefs and opinions which guide their actions. As
modern societies suffer from amnesia, we witness the transformation of
living memory into institutionally shaped and sustained memory (Assmann
1995). Cultural memory, memory institutionalized through cultural means,
is ‘embodied in objectivations that store meaning in a concentrated manner’
(Heller 2001: 1031). As ‘memory that is shared outside the avenues of
formal historical discourse yet ... is entangled with cultural products and
imbued with cultural meaning’ (Sturken 1997: 3), cultural memory refers to
people’s memories constructed from the cultural forms and to cultural forms
available for use by people to construct their relations to the past (Schudson
1995: 348). These cultural forms are distributed across social institutions
and cultural artefacts such as films, monuments, statues, souvenirs and
so on. Cultural memory is also embodied in regularly repeated practices,
commemorations, ceremonies, festivals and rites. Since the individual

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 13

‘piggybacks on the social and cultural practices of memory’, cultural
memory can exist independently of its carriers (Schudson 1995: 347). Cul-
tural memory, as memory constituted through cultural means, comes close
to Warburg’s concept of the ‘social memory’ as communicated in visual
imageries (Assmann 1995) - a notion which is popular mainly in the vast
literature concerning museums, monuments, sculpture and festival culture in
art and cultural history.

This approach, therefore, suggests that collective memory is not limited to
the past that is shared together but also includes a representation of the past
embodied in various cultural practices, especially in commemorative sym-
bolism. Collective memory is not only what people really remember through
their own experience, it also incorporates the constructed past which is
constitutive of the collectivity. For instance, although citizens of Quebec,
whose licence plates proudly state ‘I remember’, do not really remember the
French colonial state, this past is a crucial element of the national memory of
Quebec. Thus, the notion of collective memory refers both to a past that is
commonly shared and a past that is collectively commemorated. As the
word ‘commemorate’ derives from Latin com (together) and momorare (to
remember), it can be said that the past that is jointly remembered and the
past that is commonly shared are the crucial elements of collective memory
(Schwartz 2000: 9). The fact that a commemorated event is one invested
with extraordinary significance and assigned a qualitatively distinct place
in a groups’ conception of the past prompts some writers to assert that
if ‘there is such a thing as social memory ... we are likely to find it in
commemorative ceremonies’ (Connerton 1989: 4).

Memory’s essential role in social life is connected with the fact that ‘col-
lective memory is part of culture’s meaning-making apparatus’ (Schwartz
2000: 17). Our need for meaning, or, in other words, for being incorporated
into something that transfigures individual existence, grants enormous
importance to collective memory since it ‘establishes an image of the world
so compelling as to render meaningful its deepest perplexities’ (Schwartz
2000: 17). In this way, collective memory not only reflects the past but also
shapes present reality by providing people with understandings and sym-
bolic frameworks that enable them to make sense of the world. Because the
past is frequently used as the mirror in which we search for an explanation
and remedy to our present-day problems, memory, is seen ‘as [a] cure to the
pathologies of modern life’ (Huyssen 1995: 6). By mediating and paring the
past and the present, as well as providing analogies to events of the present
in past events, collective memory is strategic in character and capable of
influencing the present. In other words, as we search for a means to impose a
meaningful order upon reality, we rely on memory for the provision of
symbolic representations and frames which can influence and organize both
our actions and our conception of ourselves. Thus ‘memory at once reflects,
programs, and frames the present’ (Schwartz 2000: 18).

1 4 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Furthermore, the importance of memory lies in the identity that it shapes.
The content of memory is subject to time as it changes with every new
identity and every new present, so memory and temporality cannot be
detached from each other. As self-identity presumes memory and because
perception hinges upon remembered meanings, two processes are at work
here. On the one hand, collective memory allows people to have a certain
social identification, both on an individual and a societal level. On the other,
following the old sociological assertion that the present influences the past,
it can be said that the reconstruction of the past always depends on present-
day identities and contexts. Memory can also play an important role as a
source of truth. This happens where political power heavily censors national
history and where oppressed nations have a profound deficit of truth. There-
fore, they tend to look towards memory for authentic stories about their
past. This inseparability of the content and form of memory and the issue of
power is well illustrated by the situation in Soviet Latvia from 1940 to 1991,
where people’s memories conflicted with the official version of history
and therefore they acquired ‘a central importance of the preservation of
authenticity and truth’ (Skultans 1998: 28).

Social memory is also the crucial condition of people relations, since both
conflict and cooperation hinge upon it. Groups’ cooperative attitudes are the
result of their ability to critically evaluate their respective pasts in a way that
secures tolerance and removes barriers to mutual understanding. On the
other hand, memory which is used to close boundaries of ethnic, national or
other identities and which accepts some versions of the past as ‘the truth’ can
aggravate conflicts. For example, the central memory of the Serbs, the lost
Battle of Kosovo in 1389, symbolizes the permanent Muslim intention to
colonize them and therefore is one of the obstacles to harmonious relations
between Serbs and Muslims (Ray 1999). Another very important function of
social remembering, which is best expressed in Karl Deutsch’s remark that
‘memory is essential for any extended functioning of autonomy’ (quoted in
Hosking 1989: 119), emphasizes the role of memory as helping us to ensure
and improve the conditions of freedom by mastering our democratic institu-
tions. Without memory - that is, without the checking of, and reflection
upon, past records of institutions and public activities - we will have no
warnings about potential dangers to democratic structures and no oppor-
tunity to gain a richer awareness of the repertoire of possible remedies.
Memory, understood as a set of complex practices which contribute to our
self-awareness, allows us to assess our potentialities and limits. ‘Without
memory’, writes Deutsch, ‘would-be self-steering organizations are apt to
drift with their environment’ because they are unable to reassess and
reformulate their rules and aims in the light of experience. This statement is
supported by many empirical studies which show that the lack of interest in
the past and the lack of knowledge of the past tend to be accompanied by
authoritarianism and utopian thinking, and that ‘the root of oppression is

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 15

loss of memory’ (Gunn Allen 1999: 589). However, we need also to remem-
ber that since the nineteenth century, ‘memory has seemed the mechanism
by which ideology materializes itself’ (Terdiman 1993: 33).

Memory, functioning as organized practices designed to ensure the repro-
duction of social and political order, is a source of ‘factual’ material for
propaganda. Its task is to provide social groups or societies with identities
and a set of unifying beliefs and values from which objectives are derived for
political programmes and actions. Memory, when employed as a reservoir
of officially sanctioned heroes and myths, can be seen as a broad and always
(to some degree) invented tradition that explains and justifies the ends
and means of organized social action and provides people with beliefs and
opinions. This role of memory has been important since the end of the
eighteenth century, when the new nation states started to construct their
citizens’ national identities with commemoration rituals, marches, cere-
monies, festivals and the help of teachers, poets and painters (Hobsbawm
and Ranger 1983). Thus, collective memory is not just historical knowledge,
because it is experience, mediated by representation of the past, that enacts
and gives substance to a group’s identity. In order to understand the produc-
tion of social memory we need to examine how a group maintains
and cultivates a common memory. One way to start studying the social
formation of memory is to analyse social contexts in which memories are
embedded - groups that socialize us to what should be remembered and
what should be forgotten; so-called mnemonic communities.

The communities of memory

In many languages ‘memory stands, originally, not only for the mental act of
remembering but also for the objective continuity of one’s name - the name
of a person, a family, a tribe or a nation’ (Funkenstein 1993: 30). These
groups - the family, the ethnic group and the nation - are examples of the
main mnemonic communities which socialize us to what should be remem-
bered and what should be forgotten. They affect the ‘depth’ of our memory;
they regulate how far back we should remember, which part of the past
should be remembered, which events mark the beginning and which should
be forced out of our story. The process of our mnemonic socialization is an
important part of all groups’ general effort to incorporate new members.
As such it is ‘a subtle process that usually happens rather tacitly; listening to
a family member recount a shared experience, for example, implicitly
teaches one what is considered memorable and what one can actually forget’
(Zerubavel 1997: 87). Mnemonic communities, through introducing and
familiarizing new arrivals to their collective past, ensure that new members,
by identifying with the groups’ past, attain a required social identity. Since
we tend to remember what is familiar - because familiar facts fit easily into

1 6 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

our mental structures, and therefore make sense to us - groups’ identities and
collective memory are continuously reinforced. Due to a group’s mnemonic
tradition, a particular cognitive bias marks every group’s remembering.
Typically, such a bias expresses some essential truth about the group and its
identity and equips the group with the emotional tone and style of its
remembering. For instance, the partition of Poland in the eighteenth century
gave that country an essential identity as ‘the Christ among nations: cruci-
fied and recrucified by foreign oppression’, and through this established
prism of victimhood many Poles still interpret their national fate.

Furthermore, a group’s memory is linked to places, ruins, landscapes,
monuments and urban architecture, which - as they are overlain with sym-
bolic associations to past events - play an important role in helping to pre-
serve group memory. Such sites, and also locations where a significant event
is regularly celebrated and replayed, remain ‘concrete and distinct regardless
of whether they are mythological or historical’ (Heller 2001: 1031). The fact
that memories are often organized around places and objects suggests that
remembering is something that occurs in the world of things and involves
our senses. This was well understood by the ancient Greeks (see Chapter 2).
Halbwachs, on the other hand, brings to our attention the fact that there are
as many ways of representing space as there are groups and that each group
leaves its imprint on its place. Arguing that our recollections are located with
the help of landmarks that we always carry within ourselves, Halbwachs
observes that space is ‘a reality that endures’, thus we can understand how
we recapture the past only by understanding how it is preserved by our
physical surroundings ([1926] 1950: 84-8). In The Legendary Topography
of the Gospels in the Holy Land, Halbwachs (1941) demonstrates the work-
ing of memory. He shows how Jews, Romans, Christians and Muslims
rewrote the history of Jerusalem by remodelling the space according to their
religious beliefs. Hence, ‘When one looks at the physiognomy of the holy
places in successive times, one finds the character of these groups inscribed’
(Halbwachs [1941] 1992: 235). The discovery of several strata of memory
superimposed on the Holy Land leads Halbwachs to argue that memory
imprints its effect on the topography and that each group cuts up space in
order to compose a fixed framework within which to enclose and retrieve its
remembrance.

The link between landscape and memory is also present in Benjamin’s
(1968) viewing of the city as a repository of people’s memories. Seeing the
urban landscape as the battleground for the past, where the past remains
open and contestable, he argues that the city can be read as the topography
of a collective memory in which buildings are mnemonic symbols which
can reveal hidden and forgotten pasts. Although the city offers us ‘an
illusionary and deceptive vision of the past’ as many real histories are
buried and covered (Gilloch 1996: 13), new events or new encounters
can help us to uncover the city’s true memories. So, memory and the

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 17

metropolis are interwoven as memory shapes and is in turn shaped by the
urban setting.

The nation is the main mnemonic community, for its continuity relies on
the vision of a suitable past and a believable future. In order to create a
required community’s history and destiny, which in turn can be used to form
the representation of the nation, the nation requires a usable past. Typically
the creation of such a past is the task of nationalist movements, which
propagate an ideology affirming identification with the nation state by
invoking shared memories (Gellner 1993). Such movements owe their suc-
cess, therefore, to memory, which they effectively employ to establish a sense
of continuity between generations. The main way to shape societal aspir-
ation for a shared destiny is by the rediscovery of memories of the ‘golden
age’ and a heroic past (Smith 1997). In addition, appeals ‘to the earliest
individual memories of childhood - turns of phrase, catches of song, sights
and smells - and [linking] them to the idea of the historical continuity of
people, its culture and land’ (Wrong 1994: 237), contributes significantly to
the success of nationalist movements. However, as nations need to establish
their representation in the past, their memories are created in tandem with
forgetting; to remember everything could bring a threat to national cohesion
and self-image. Forgetting is a necessary component in the construction of
memory just as the writing of a historical narrative necessarily involves the
elimination of certain elements. The role of forgetting in the construction of
national identities has been noticed by Ernst Renan, who, in 1882, insisted
that the creation of a nation requires the creative use of past events. He
pointed out that, although nations could be characterized by ‘the possession
in common of a rich legacy of memories’, the essence of a nation is not only
that its members have many things in common, but also ‘that they have
forgotten some things’ (Renan [1882] 1990: 11). In order to ensure national
cohesion there is a need to forget events that represent a threat to unity and
remember heroes and glory days. Renan’s interpretation of collective mem-
ory continues to exert considerable influence on the way in which nations
articulate themselves in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anderson
(1983) argues that being reminded of what one has already forgotten is a
normal mechanism by which nations are constructed. He demonstrates how
national memories, themselves underscored by selective forgetting, consti-
tute one of the most important mechanisms by which a nation constructs a
collective identity or become an ‘imagined community’. Hobsbawm and
Ranger (1983: 14) show that states engaged in historical construction of
modern nations claim nations ‘to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in
the remote antiquity’.

It has also been argued that our relation to the national past can be better
described not so much as remembering but as forgetting. Billig (1995) sug-
gests that established nations depend for their continued existence upon a
collective amnesia. In such societies, not only is ‘the past forgotten, but also

1 8 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

there is a parallel forgetting of the present’ (Billig 1995: 38). Forgetting,
however, can also be highly organized and strategic, as examples from less
open and democratic societies illustrate. Forced forgetting (Burke 1989) was
of particular importance in communist countries, where people understood
that ‘the struggle against power is the struggle against forgetting’ (Kundera
1980: 3). As the majority of communist regimes were also nation-building
regimes, they ‘went to great lengths to create new myths and to instill these
in society through . . . political socialization mechanisms’ (Cohen 1999:
27). They, like all new states, were busy constructing the national self-
consciousness and used official ceremonies, education and socialization to
create and foster a single, national, Marxist-Leninist class-based interpret-
ation of the national history (Wingfield 2000). Politically and culturally
oppressive states impose forgetting not only by rewriting and censorship
of national history, but also by the destruction of places of memory. The
Chinese communist government, for example, aimed to destory all places of
memory, such as temples and monasteries, after the occupation of Tibet in
1951.

In today’s societies, with their diversity of cultures, ethnicities, religions
and traditions, we are witnessing the fragmentation of national memory.
The processes of globalization, diversification and fragmentation of social
interests further enhance the transformation of memory from the master
narrative of nations to the episodic narrative of groups. The denationaliza-
tion of memory, on the one hand, and an arrival of ailing and dispersed
memories, on the other, in the context of the growing cultural and ethnic
pluralization of societies, have provided a new importance to ethnic iden-
tities, whose formation is based on traditional memory narratives. Among
all the groups in need of memory, ‘ethnic groups have had the easiest task,
for they have never entirely lost their cultural memory’ (Heller 2001: 1032).
Moreover, many forgotten elements can be brought to light, ‘fused with new
myths and stories of repression and suffering, or combined with hetero-
geneous cultural memorabilia such as music, crafts, and religious lore’
(Heller 2001: 1032). As we witness the emergence of small, surrogate ethnic
memories and a growing reliance on the specific content of a group memory
to legitimize the group’s political claims, battles ‘for minorities’ rights are
increasingly organized around questions of cultural memory, its exclusions
and taboo zones’ (Huyssen 1995: 5). With ethnic memories surfacing in
affiliation with the politics of identity, which itself is a result of the increas-
ing importance of discourses of human rights in the global and postcolonial
world, memories of past injustices are a critical source of empowerment.
Today’s fascination with ethnic memory, in the context of the declining of
authoritative memories (traditional religious and national memories), poses
new challenges for democratic systems (see Chapter 6).

The family is another group that plays a crucial role in the construction of
our memories. As long as the family jointly produces and maintains its

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 19

memory, its cohesion and continuity is ensured. The content of the shared
family’s narrative, symbolic of family unity across generations, reproduces
family traditions, secrets and particular sentiments. These memories,
objectified in old letters, photographs and family lore, are sustained through
family conversations, as past events are jointly recalled or co-memorized
(Billig 1990). Middleton and Edwards (1988) illustrated this process by
researching how families collectively remembered past events by talking
about photographs. As much research shows, children learn to remember in
the family environment, guided by parental intervention and shared remin-
iscence. We do not remember ourselves as very young kids very clearly, so
we rely on the memories of older members of our family, with the result that
many of our earliest memories are actually recollections of stories we heard
from adults about our childhood. Our memory is more accurately described
as a collection of overlapping testimonies from our narrative environments,
which influence our memory’s emotional tone, style and content.

Presently we witness two processes: on the one hand, the growing impact
of what might be described as the quest for family roots; and on the other
the decline in the family’s capability to maintain a living chain of memory.
Family history was one of the most striking discoveries of the 1960s and has
given rise to the most remarkable ‘do-it-yourself archive-based scholarship
of our time’ (Samuel 1999: 169). This trend has been popularized by
the mass media, with many books and films blending private and public
memories. The growing interest in telling a family story has been recently
assisted by new technologies such as the internet, where the numbers of
family websites devoted to the construction of families’ memory increases
daily. At the same time there is a trend that suggests that families are less and
less capable of maintaining their traditions due to changes in their structures
and memberships, and this reflects the wider fate of memory in modern
society. The decline of the extended, multi-generational family is leading
to the destruction of a social framework that ensured the transmission of
collective memories from one generation to the next. As family size and
stability declines, the depth of family memory also suffers.

All three communities of memory (nation, ethnic group and family) are
affected by the growing differentiation of society, the globalization of the
world and by the development of new means of communication. These
factors have also caused changes in the functioning of the institutions of
memory.

The institutions of memory

In today’s society, collective memory is increasingly shaped by specialized
institutions: schools, courts, museums and the mass media. The grow-
ing number of ‘ideas, assumptions, and knowledges that structure the

20 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

relationship of individuals and groups to the immediate as well as the more
distant past’ (Sherman 1999: 2) is formed, interpreted and preserved by
public institutions. The ideological themes that pervade the rhetoric of
public authorities and the educational curricula, with history classes in
school being the main example, ‘tutor’ public memory and promote a
specific version of the past. Schools and textbooks are important vehicles
through which societies transmit the idealized past and promote ideas of a
national identity and unity. Textbooks have always been updated and
rewritten to present the acceptable vision of the past, and although now, due
to international pressures and national voices, textbooks are frequently the
subject of external and domestic scrutiny, in many national narratives past
events that could harm social cohesion and the authority of the state are still
underplayed. Where the state controls the educational and media system,
collective memory is fragmented, full of ‘black holes’, dominated by ideo-
logical values and used to produce legitimacy for the ruling elite. For
example, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, the official sanctioned memory of World War
II, around which textbook narratives were structured, was a crucial element
in the creation of legitimacy, myth and identity for the new communist state
(Hoepken 1999). In such a situation, where the legitimization of social and
political order depends upon official censorship, socially organized forget-
ting and the suppression of those elements that do not fit the regime’s image
of past events, unofficial and informal institutions as well an oral memory
transmitted informally, frequently with the help of jokes, gossip, double-
speak and anecdotes, are essential to the preservation of collective memory.

Another institution which increasingly shapes our collective memory is
the legal system. The relationship between public memory and the law is at
the foundation of many countries’ original conceptions of themselves. For
example, such legal documents as the Magna Carta (UK) or the Declaration
of Independence (USA) are essential for understanding these societies’
origins and values. Not only is the legal system itself an enormously influen-
tial institution of collective memory, but in many countries changes in col-
lective memory are legally induced. In all societies, to a considerable extent,
courts, through their input in deciding historical questions, form collective
memory. Postwar Europe saw many criminal prosecutions which aimed to
influence national collective memories, the Nuremberg trials being the main
example. Despite controversies and debates surrounding attempts to punish
state-sponsored mass murder and readdress national memories, the trials’
achievements for constructing the basis for new memories and a new order
cannot be overlooked. Today, due to the proliferation of the language
of human rights and the new strength of the politics of identity, we see an
increase in demands for governments to address historical injustices com-
mitted in their name. Consequently, many nations, and not only those emer-
ging from their authoritarian past, use the legal system to bring justice and
to teach a particular interpretation of the country’s history (see Chapter 6).

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 21

Legal attempts to construct collective memory are not without tensions
and difficulties (Misztal 2001) but because they allow for confrontation of
various memories, they can serve the periodic need to reawaken and
strengthen the public’s feelings of moral outrage.

A further important institution of memory is the museum. Museums
originated in the late eighteenth century as monuments to wealth and civic
patrimony, in the form of collections of material objects in courts and
churches. From the nineteenth century it was an educational imperative of
the emerging nation state to form national identity and ‘to elevate the work-
ing class’ that was responsible for the opening of exhibitions to a national
public. Although museums have much in common with other institutions of
memory, their authoritative and legitimizing status and their role as symbols
of community constitute them as a distinctive cultural complex (Macdonald
1996). Museums are unusual not only because their development is con-
nected to the formation and honouring of the nation state, but also because
of their role in the social objectification of the past and organized memory
around diverse artefacts.

Until recently, museums were mainly devoted to the preservation of a
memory that constituted one of the high points of a national history, and
therefore they were collecting ‘objects to which the observer no longer has a
vital relationship and which are in the process of dying’ (Adorno 1967: 175).
‘Museum and mausoleum’, in Adorno’s famous phrase, were associated by
more than phonetics. Today, however, their authority as the curators of
national treasures and the dictators of distinction and taste is challenged.
This is a result of several factors, such as the availability of new technolo-
gies, the fragmentation and denationalization of memory and the develop-
ment of a popular passion for heritage - that is, for ‘the interpretation of the
past through an artefactual history’ (Urry 1996: 53) - resulting in an interest
in old places, crafts, houses, countryside, old railways and so on.

With many museums fundamentally transforming their practice of col-
lecting and exhibiting, their function now bears a strong relationship to
memory production (Crane 2000a). Thus, ‘the museum is no longer simply
the guardian of treasures and artefacts from the past discreetly exhibited for
the select group of experts’, but has moved closer to ‘the world of spectacle,
of popular fair and mass entertainment’ (Huyssen 1995: 19). In this process
of transformation from the position of traditional cultural authority to a
new role as cultural mediators in a more multicultural environment,
museums redefine their strategies of representation of the past and find
spaces for marginalized memories. This new opportunity for excluded
memories, in the context of the decline of the management of public memory
by the state, has resulted in the increased articulation of memory by various
agencies from civil society and the enormous explosion of heritage and con-
servation organizations and movements.

Today, the most important role in the construction of collective memories

22 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

is played by the mass media (McLuhan 1962). Before the development of the
mass media, most people’s sense of the past and the world beyond their
immediate milieu was constituted by oral traditions that were produced and
reproduced in the social context of everyday life. The shift from relying only
on face-to face exchanges to depending on mediated interaction has pro-
foundly affected the ways in which people organize material for recall as
well as their modes of reconstructing the past (Thompson 1996: 95). Rapid
technological advancements in the field of communication in the late nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries and the creation of the mass audience have
ensured that the media is an extremely powerful instrument of ordering our
knowledge of the past. In the nineteenth century it was the press that was the
central means of communication and that provided people with images of
groups that they could identify with. The press helped the transition from
the local to the national by turning existing societies, through highlighting
the common past and a constant repetition of images and words, into
national communities (Anderson 1983). Now, the function of memory-
keeping and presentation is ‘increasingly assigned to the electronic media’
(Samuel 1994: 25). The nature of this media and their interest in meeting
public demands for instant entertainment are not without impact on the
content and form of representations of the past. Thus, the input of media
into how and what we remember is a crucial factor influencing the status of
memory in contemporary societies.

The shift from oral culture, through writing and print, to electronic pro-
cessing of the word has induced changes in the experience of time, brought
about a new conception of the past and created growing possibilities for
abstract thought. Thus, it can be said that the evolution of the role and form
of social memory has been shaped by technological changes in the means of
communication, and this is one of the most important factors structuring the
status of memory in modern society.

The status of memory

Our discussion so far suggests that we rely on many social frameworks,
institutions, places and objects to help us remember. The relationship
between memory and objects is rather complicated because material objects,
operating as vehicles of memory, can be of various types (e.g., dynamic or
stable). Moreover, they provide us either with images and words, or both,
while at the same time memory does not reside specifically in any image
or word. Not only does our ability to remember depend on images and/or
words, but how images work depends largely on their complex linkage
with words, since images have in part always depended on words for direct
interpretation, although images also function differently from words. If
words and images offer two different kinds of representation, we can expect

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 23

that as ‘modes of representation change, both the relationship between
words and images changes as well as how we understand images and words
independently of each other’ (Zelizer 1998: 5). Thus, the dependence on
either words or images results in contrasting cultural values and also in
contesting roles of memory. In order to throw light on changes in the status
and meaning of memory, it is useful to have a quick look at discussions of
the cultural consequences of the shift from oral culture to literacy.

When discussing the role of memory it is often assumed that in an
‘oral’ society - that is, in a society where communication occurs in forms
other than written documents - culture depends upon memory and hence
memory is highly valued. A further argument is that the ‘rise of literacy’
threatens memory. The assertion that technological change means the
devalourization of memory has been a permanent element of the history of
memory since ancient times. Starting with Plato’s argument that the devel-
opment of writing itself is a threat to individual memory, the idea that
memory is in crisis has become the focus point of the centuries-long debate
about memory. However, many writers protest against misconceptions
about the value of memory in oral cultures and against the notion of
memory crisis with the rise of literacy (Ong 1983; Carruthers 1990; Le Goff
1992; Goody 1998).

These scholars argue that the distinction between oral and literary
societies is misleading because, as the continuation of the oral component in
literary societies illustrates, the possession of writing does not mean that a
society has ceased to be an oral culture as well. The majority of researchers
agree that the rise of literacy does not necessarily bring the devalourization
of memory and that learning by hearing material and reciting it does not
necessarily imply an ignorance of reading. The reliance on living memories,
associated with the oral transmission of a living past persisted long after the
advent of print, and indeed continues to the present day (Ong 1983). In all
cultures, not only in those without writing, memorizing is a part of everyday
life (Goody 1977: 35). Moreover, basing the distinction between preliterate
and literate cultures on a difference in levels of rationality embedded in those
cultures needs to be rejected, as the extent to which a society is capable of
transmitting its social memory in a logical and articulate form is not depend-
ent upon the possession of writing but is rather connected with that society’s
representation of language and its perception of knowledge (Fentress and
Wickham 1992: 45). Many studies illustrating a continuity between the
mnemonic habits of preliterate and literary cultures argue that the privileged
cultural role of memory depends ‘on the role which rhetoric has in a culture
rather than on whether its texts are presented in oral or written forms’ - so
in societies where literature is valued for its social function, rhetoric
and interpretation works to provide the sources of a group’s memory
(Carruthers 1990: 10, 12). In similar vein, Assmann (1997), stresses the
importance of oral transmission in cultures which, despite the possession of

24 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

written means for preserving the past, keep their main texts alive through
commentary.

Nevertheless, although preliterate cultures do not necessarily differ in
terms of tasks and the value they assign to memory, the content of memory
and the principal domain in which memory crystallizes have been affected
by various processes such as the transformation of the technical means of
preserving the past, changes in the experience of time, the increased interest
in the past and the occurrence of dramatic events. For example, writing,
because it generates cultural innovation by promoting economization and
scepticism, encourages ‘the production of unfamiliar statements and the
thinking of novel thoughts’ (Connerton 1989: 76). Furthermore, while
speech can preserve memories over long intervals of time, it is too fleeting
to permit any listener to pause for recollection; thus a sense of the past ‘that
is primarily based on hearing tales from others is different from one that is
primarily based on reading oneself’ (Eisenstein 1966: 49). As the ‘pastness’
of the past depends upon a historical sensibility, this can hardly begin to
operate without permanent written records. Hence, literate societies, where
records reveal the past is unlike the present, differ from oral cultures in their
attitudes to the past. The repetitive regularity of most orally transmitted
history means that most knowledge of the past is in fact shared, while in
literate societies ‘printed historical texts are widely disseminated but most
knowledge of the past is fragmented into segments exclusive to small
clusters of specialists and the consensually shared past shrinks to a thin
media-dominated veneer’ (Lowenthal 1998: 238). In literary cultures, past
events, removed from living memories and fixed to printed pages, lose their
vividness and immediacy. Moreover, as nobody could be expected to
remember the content of continuously expanded libraries, the past is not
entirely known. However, printed texts facilitate critical approaches and
open inquiry into the past (Ong 1983). The new awareness of historicity
came into being ‘when it became possible to set one fixed account of the
world beside another so that the contradictions within and between them
could literally be seen’ (Connerton 1989: 76). In contrast, oral societies
live very much in the present and only with memories which have present
relevance and which articulate inconsistent cultural inheritance.

The ‘electronification’ of memory provides a new dimension to the role
memory plays in our image-fed society (Urry 1996: 63). Digital tech-
nology, interactive media and information systems have greatly changed the
facets of memory practices in our time, and as a result today’s memory is
‘composed of bits and pieces’ (Hervieu-Leger 2000: 129). The immediacy of
communication, information overload, the speed of changing images, the
growing hybridity of media, all further expand and problematize the status
of memory. We have unlimited access to facts, sources and information,
which we can store, freeze and replay. At the same time, visual images can
interfere with and confuse our memories. For example, computer-generated

MEMORY EXPERIENCE 25

graphics can fake the truth about the past, as they do in films like Forrest
Gump and Zoolander). This decline of the credibility of photographic
images and other visual evidence, together with the overabundance of flick-
ering and changing narratives and images, is a threat to the status of memory
as it raises the question of whose vision of the past and whose memories
should be trusted. In the same vein, just as in print culture, readers’ assess-
ment of trust in the book underwrote the stability of knowledge and society
(Johns 1998), trust in media (in other words, institutional trust) is crucial in
making narratives of memory and identity into dominant cultural represen-
tations of reality.

The importance of institutional trust means that technological change is
not the sole factor responsible for the status of memory. Both the shift in
means of communication and the changes in modes of social organization,
including changes in the practice of power, influence the nature of mnemonic
practices. In other words, the structuring of memory in society is shaped by
technological changes in the means of communication and the transform-
ation of the dominant institutions of society. Memory, as the main source of
collective identity, has always been employed by various social forces to
boost their control and standing. When the main social authority was
religious institutions, for example (as in ancient Israel), religious memory
was called upon to sustain followers’ allegiance; thus the biblical continuous
appeal to ‘Zakbor’ (‘remember’) that ensured that remembering was ‘felt as
a religious imperative to an entire people’ (Yerushalmi 1982: 9). Similarly,
the emergence of the nation state was accompanied by inventions of new
memories to enhance national identities. Today, memory is more distant
from traditional sources of power, while at the same time it becomes increas-
ingly shaped by mass media.

To sum up, this chapter, after describing different forms of memory,
defined collective memory as the representation of the past, both the past
shared by a group and the past that is collectively commemorated, that
enacts and gives substance to the group’s identity, its present conditions and
its vision of the future. The following presentation of the role of main mne-
monic communities and institutions of memory aimed to expand our under-
standing of the social formation of memory. Discussing further the status of
memory, we noted how changes in modes of communication and social
organization influence the structure and status of memory. Since memory
has travelled from oral expression through print literacy to today’s elec-
tronic means of communication, we can conclude by saying that memory
has its own history. This history, linked to a large degree to the history of
changing modes of communication and techniques of power, will be dis-
cussed in the next chapter.

26 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Further reading

Baddley, A. (1989) The psychology of remembering and forgetting, in T. Butler (ed.)

Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, pp. 33-60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Goody, J. (1998) Memory in oral tradition, in P. Fara and K. Patterson (eds)
Memory, pp. 73-94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Renan, E. ([1882] 1990) What is a nation?, in H.K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and
Narration. London: Routledge.

Schudson, M. (1995) Distortion in collective memory, in D.L. Schacter (ed.) Memory
Distortion, pp. 346-63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sennett, R. (1998) Disturbing memories, in P. Fara and K. Patterson (eds) Memory,
pp. 10-46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

METAMORPHOSIS OF
M E M O RY

‘Memory has always had political or ideological overtones, but
each epoch has found its own meaning in memory’

(Hacking 1995: 200)

As we concluded in the previous chapter, memory has its own history as its
status has been affected by the shift from preliterate culture through literacy
to today’s capacity to freeze, replay and store visual memories. The history
of collective memory can be divided into five periods (Le Goff 1992). The
first phase refers to the collective memory of people without writing. The
second period, antiquity, is characterized by the predominance of oral
memory alongside written memory. The medieval period is seen as express-
ing itself in equilibrium between the oral and the written and in the trans-
formation of the two memories’ function. The period from the sixteenth
century until the present is characterized by the progress of written memory
connected with printing and literacy. The last, current phase is parallel to the
revolutionary changes of the present day and results in memory expansion
(LeGoff 1992: 54-5).

Memory in oral cultures

The notion of an oral culture refers to a society without writing or to a
society in which the capacity to produce and understand written symbols
(i.e. literacy) is confined to a small social, political or religious elite. Goody
and Watt (1968) offer a fascinating set of studies of the impact of literacy on
societies ranging from Greece in the seventh century bce to pre-Columbus
America (i.e. before 1450), to pre-colonial Africa, India and Asia (i.e. before
the nineteenth century). Oral cultures, like all cultures, depended upon

28 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

stored knowledge. However, the accumulation and transmission of know-
ledge in such societies largely relied on so-called ‘ethnic memory’ (Le Goff
1992: 55) which differs in its content, orientation and precision from mem-
ory in literary societies. In ‘ethnic memories’, the past was fused with the
present, the collective identity based on myths, while handing down modes
of life from the past, was expressed by genealogies and was more a matter of
ingrained habit than deliberate effort. The past in oral cultures was not felt
as an itemized terrain consisting of verifiable facts but was the domain of
‘the ancestors, a resonant source for renewing awareness of present exist-
ence’ (Ong 1983: 98). In oral cultures people assumed that things were as
they had always been, because oral transmission accumulates actual alter-
ations unconsciously, continually readjusting the past to fit the present
(Goody 1998: 74-93).

The main contrast between memory in a society in which communication
occurs in forms other than written documents, and memory in societies
collecting written documents and transforming them into testimony, is con-
nected with their different conceptualization of the distinction between past
and present (Le Goff 1992: 55-7). Oral cultures provide a milieu of living
memory where the past expands beyond 10 to 12 generations in lineage
structure or a 50-100 year span. The oral transmission of the past means
that the past is bound to the present for its survival. The past exists only in so
far as it continues to be held in living memory, and it is so remembered only
as long as it serves present needs. Due to the limitations of memory in oral
cultures, such societies’ response to time is limited to an annual cycle and
therefore cannot be used to differentiate longer periods than seasons. In oral
societies, time is not a continuum as it is ‘an order of events of outstanding
significance to a group’ (Evans-Pritchard 1968: 109). It is also relative to
structural space because ‘each group has its own points of reference’.

The second significant difference is connected with the orientation of col-
lective memory in oral societies towards the time of origin and mythical
heroes. In an oral culture, the past refers essentially to a mythical creation or
Golden Age, with personal genealogies claiming to run to the beginning of
time. Furthermore, due to the attraction of the ancestral past, the ‘peculiar-
ity of primitive thought is to be atemporal; it tries to grasp the world simul-
taneously as a synchronic and as diachronic totality’ (Levi-Strauss 1966:
55). Memory, moreover, is the only frame of reference by which to judge the
past, and therefore it plays an important role in maintaining the order and
cohesion of the group. Since in oral cultures all relationships must be
explained in terms of the past, memory coordinates and cements social
relations (Evans-Pritchard 1968: 105).

Oral traditions consist of records of mythology, lists of kings, genealogies,
legends and clan names, so the memory of people without writing provides a
parallel historical foundation for the existence of ethnic groups or families -
that is, myths of origin. Since spirits of the departed remain intimately

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 29

involved with everyday life, for many people in these societies ‘the past was
not a foreign country but their own’ (Lownethal 1998: 13). In other words,
oral tradition ‘combines mythology, genealogy and narrative history, rather
than holding them apart’ (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 82). In many
such cultures oral tradition is helped by a specialist (e.g. in many African
societies, where the main practices of memorization rely on songs, a
memory-man is a ‘lore master’ or ‘praise singer’) who preserves rituals,
technologies and local knowledge. Ritualistic chants are repeated from per-
formance to performance, while habit and custom ensure the memorization
of practical, technical and professional knowledge without revealing the
specific nature of the habit (Ong 1983: 63-5; Le Goff 1992: 56; Hutton
1993: 17). This type of memory is gained through apprenticeship and is
based on a respect for custom and habit. Hence, memory in oral traditions
can be ‘identified primarily with habit; its authority is derived from the felt
need to reiterate the wisdom bequest by the past’ (Hutton 1993: 17).

However, memory transmitted through custom and habit does not stand
still because it is not ‘word-for-word memory’ and because the past is con-
tinually updated as new realities present themselves (Levi-Strauss 1966, Le
Goff 1992; Goody 1998). The unique flexibility of oral traditions is linked
to the transformative nature of their knowledge, which is stored in a way
that cannot be recalled precisely. As oral versions of events are recited in
different times and places, oral memory becomes ‘re-worked experience’
(Goody 1998: 88-94). Due to the role of forgetting, human diversity and the
generative use of language and gesture, memory seems to function in these
societies in accordance with ‘generative reconstruction’ rather than mechan-
ical memorization. Hence ‘every performance is also a creative act, there is
no distinct separation between performer and creator’ (Goody 1998: 91).
The same argument is developed by Le Goff (1992: 57), who notes that
societies without writing ‘grant memory more freedom and creative possi-
bilities’. In other words, mnemonic reproduction word is characteristic of
literate societies rather than societies without writing where ‘imagination
and memory are virtually interchangeable because each is defined by its
capacity to form images in which past, present and future are intimately
joined’ (Hutton 1993: 17). Therefore, since in oral cultures ‘word-for-word
memory’ is impossible, the practice of memorization is not assigned an
important role and it ‘is rarely felt to be necessary’ by members of this type
of society (Goody 1977: 38).

Stressing that oral cultures are in a state of continuous creation, Goody
warns against the danger of speaking about a collective memory in such
societies: ‘An oral culture is not held in everybody’s memory store. Memories
vary as does experience. Bits may be held by different people’ (Goody 1998:
94). However, the same warning, although for different reasons, can be
issued with regard to the nature of social memory in today’s societies.
Whereas the fluidity and creativity of memory in oral cultures is connected

30 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

with the means of creation and transmission of memory available in those
societies, memory’s selectivity and plurality in literary cultures is a result of
phonetic writing’s ability to generate cultural innovation as well as of a more
complex modern social structure. Although with the rise of literacy, impro-
visation becomes increasingly difficult and innovation is institutionalized,
social memory, freed from dependence on rhythm and being the subject of
systematic criticism, is in the process of continuous change (Goody and Watt
1968). Furthermore, since modern societies offer individuals the possibility
of belonging to many groups and a choice of different sets of identities,
social memories in those systems are not exclusive but multilayered and
overlapping. Today an individual can be a member of an array of different
groups, whereas in oral cultures membership was limited, and therefore,
generally, a single group’s memory informed the individual identity.

There is yet another similarity between social memory in oral cultures and
memory in modern societies. In both cases we can observe the workings of a
general principle of structural amnesia, which directs our attention to the
role of social institutions in guiding and controlling memory (Evans-
Pritchard 1968). In both type of society, remembering and forgetting is
selective but not accidental - what is forgotten is not forgotten randomly.
This phenomenon of structural amnesia suggests that ‘the strength and
weakness of recall depend [s] on a mnemonic system, that is the whole social
order’ (Douglas 1986: 72), and thus it points to the link between memory
and social systems. In other words, collective memory in both oral and
in literary cultures, is ‘the storage for the social order’ (Douglas 1986: 70)
and therefore it is always a provisional, dynamic and selective interplay of
opinions and narratives.

The art of memory

Despite the invention of script, antiquity was characterized by the pre-
dominance of oral memory, as oral modes of expression continued to con-
vey a sense of the past that did not discriminate between the mythical and
the historical (Eisenstein 1966: 51). In Greek mythology, memory, the
goddess Mnemosyne, is a mother of nine Muses and her name symbolizes
the power of imagination and stands for the totality of cultural activities -
thus our contemporary term ‘cultural memory’. By subsuming all cultural
activities under ‘the personification of memory, the Greeks were viewing
culture not only as based on memory but as a form of memory itself’
(Assmann 1997: 15). For ancient philosophers, who held memory in the
highest esteem, remembrance was that of pure and timeless forms, not of
temporal constructs. They viewed memory as a source of immortality and
wisdom and did not distinguish between the past and imagination, nor
between the past and myth. Socrates, for example, admired memory because

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 3 1

without it no one could enjoy what her daughters, custodians of the arts and
sciences, produced as each ‘sound would fade away without ever being
included in a melody, every word in a poem would disappear before the
rhyming word was heard’ (Draaisma 2000: 5). In Plato’s and Aristotle’s
presentations, ‘the gift of memory’, placed in the soul and thus a function
of the soul, is seen as essential for a virtuous and just life. Such ‘mystical
divinization of memory’ meant that even ‘the greatest Greek philosophers
never fully succeeded in reconciling memory and history’ (Le Goff 1992:
65). However, the trend towards the secularization of memory and the
discovery of the technique of improving memory induced a slow process of
transformation in this relationship.

This new technique, ars memoria, or the art of memory, is attributed to
the poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 bce), who discovered the import-
ance of order and the sense of sight for memory. Proceeding from Aristotle’s
assertion that there is no thought without an image and that recollection
means perceiving something as an image, ars memoria assigned a central
role to mental images (Yates 1966: 3-5). The mnemotechnics involved locat-
ing each element to be remembered in imaginary palaces of memory so that
it could be easily recovered in its proper place by conceptually ‘touring’
those palaces. Orators, in order to associate the texts and ideas to be
remembered with the image of a place, relied on paintings, sculptures
and buildings as aids in the process of the placement of allegorical images
within a Active architecture. Thus, when they were mentally walking around
imaginary objects as if they were statues in a palace, gallery or theatre, their
remembering was enhanced. As philosophers, such as Cicero, focused on
the difference between artificial or trained, and conventional or natural
memory, and insisted that a memory strengthened by training was an essen-
tial part of the orator’s equipment, memory lost its mythical aspect and
became ‘desacralized and secularized’ (Le Goff 1992: 65). This suited a
rising literary culture which still relied on memory for the organization of
knowledge, and hence on the art of memory, as a part of an education based
on rhetoric.

To sum up, in the largely oral culture of Greek and Roman antiquity,
where wax tablets were little more than a memory aid, most of what people
wanted to say in a speech still had to be committed to memory and therefore
they relied on a procedure to facilitate remembering that turned memory
into an imaginary space; this was the art of memory. The power of memory
was admired by many as it was assumed, following Plato, that all ‘know-
ledge is but remembrance’, and that therefore memory is, as Cicero said, ‘the
treasury and guardian of all things’ (quoted in Shorter 1990: 136). The high
status of the art of memory in the ancient world was also a result of the fact
that it was an elite practice, associated with orators and later with scholars
who greatly appreciated this technique’s capacities for image-making and
the preservation of knowledge. In ancient Greece, memory was seen as the

32 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

source of all the arts and sciences, while in Roman culture memory was
placed at the heart of all teaching, learning and thought (Samuel 1994: vii):
‘No art was more carefully studied, or esteemed, from Plato until
Enlightenment, than the art of memory’ (Hacking 1995: 203).

Following antiquity’s later metaphors of memory as a storage space, the
neoplatonist St Augustine (354-430) saw memory as a ‘vast, immeasurable
sanctuary’, and stressed the spiritual dimensions of memory. Augustine, see-
ing memory as ‘a great field or a spacious place, a storehouse for countless
images of all kinds’, asks: ‘Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is faculty of
my soul’ (McConkey 1996: 7). Memory was seen as a source of truth
because it allowed the recall of ‘a state of blessed happiness’, and this
memory of a lost happiness thus must contain ‘an awareness of Truth’
Cicero’s insistance on the ethical status of memory, which he saw as ‘the
soul’s highest ability’ was further enhanced by Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of memory as a part of Prudence (Draaisma
2000: 31). Thus, with memory seen as an essential element of virtue, the
technology of memory was continuously recommended as a vital factor in
the formation of moral character.

Memory in pre-modern Europe

In the medieval period oral transmission still played an important role and a
trained memory continued to be highly valued as the essential means of the
preservation of knowledge and the main safeguard against the loss of manu-
script scrolls (Yeo 2001: 83). Until the late Middle Ages, writing was still
regarded as a mere adjunct to memory and the collected knowledge was seen
as worth committing to memory. Thus the art of memory played a central
role in the scribal culture of Western Europe. Even though medieval
scholars’ memories were supplemented by the spread of texts, memory was
still envisaged as a kind of book in which images were engraved or
impressed (Yeo 2001: 79). Despite the fact that the use of writing as a
support for memory intensified, it was only after the invention of printing in
the 1450s that books came to be seen as supplementing memory (Le Goff
1992: 74).

The importance of oral transmission was also due to the fact that the
world of manuscript literacy in the Middle Ages was for the most part a
sphere of elite culture, while folk memories, rooted in oral means of trans-
mission, were dominant. It was also due to the nature of scribal culture
‘which was more closely tied to oral and auditory memory-training than is
often recognized’ (Eisenstein 1966: 44). Although the invention of script in
antiquity permitted more abstract ways of thinking, nonetheless the world
of manuscript literacy in the Middle Ages represented less an opening into
history ‘than an attempt to hold onto the wisdom of time immemorial

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 33

derived from oral tradition’ (Hutton 1993: 18). Generally, it can be said that
throughout most of the Middle Ages, literate elites shared with pre-literary
folk a common reliance upon oral transmission to teach most of what they
knew about the past (Eisenstein 1966: 53). As a result of both the dissemin-
ation of written material and memorization, medieval culture should be seen
as characterized by ‘the tension maintained between these two forms’ (Innes
1998:3).

In the Middle Ages history was not understood as an appreciation of the
reality of change but was ‘a unified Christian drama with no scope for or
interest in differences between past and present’ (Lowenthal 1985: 232).
This lack of awareness about, or denial of, the difference between the past
and the present, along with ignorance of the reality of the past meant that
medieval interest in antiquity was predicated on its relevance to present
concerns and experiences. However, the gradually increasing fascination
with classical sources and the growing authority of old manuscripts brought
about new attitudes towards the past, which was presented as being
exemplary of human practices, and towards memory, which was recon-
sidered as a capacity to make the experiences of the past live again
(Lowenthal 1985: 232-4). Consequently, the understanding of memory ‘as
a repetition, carried over from oral culture, was gradually replaced by one of
memory as a resurrection’ (Hutton 1993: 18). The rise of Christianity
brought with it an attendant understanding of history as the unfolding of a
divine plan. Medieval thinkers believed in God as being the cause of all
historical processes, and saw humans as carrying out the will of God. The
Christian experience of history, which was associated with expectations of
salvation (Carruthers 1990: 123), meant that the past and memory were not
seen as models for understanding the present or the future but as sources of
evidence of divine intervention in history (Tosh 1991: 11-12).

The new relation between memory and religion, reinforced by the nature
of Christianity and Judaism (both being ‘religions of remembrance’), by the
Bible’s frequent insistence on the duty to remember and by Christian rituals
of commemoration of saints, resulted in ‘a circular liturgical memory’ (Le
Goff 1992: 68). Apart from ‘a circular liturgical memory’, the second
element of collective memory in the medieval period was lay memory, which
was also shaped by the Church calendar (Le Goff 1992: 68). Being rooted in
oral transmission and commemoration practices, lay memory contained a
popular recounting of the family-centred past and memories of the dead.
There was no clear distinction between the past and the present as ordinary
people felt the past to be so much a part of their present that they perceived
no urgent need to preserve it (Duby 1988: 619-20). The pattern of remem-
bering characteristic of peasant societies, with their structuring of the past
through family and locality, meant that memories were local rather than
‘national’ (Lentress and Wickham 1992: 153).

The sense of the past, shaped by the interaction between written and oral

34 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

traditions, also went through profound transformations because of the
importance of mnemotechnolgy in education systems and the impact of
Christianity (Le Goff 1992: 68-72). In the Middle Ages, the art of memory
was placed in the context of logic and moral philosophy rather than
rhetoric, with the scholastic philosophers - who were central to medieval
scholarly life, literature and the arts - being its main practitioners (Yates
1966: 368). From the earliest medieval times, educators relied on visual and
spatial images and locations to improve students’ memories, while from the
thirteenth century, the architectural mnemonic, the method of projecting
images into architectural places, enjoyed a revival. The art of memory,
inherited consciously from antiquity, ‘governed much in medieval educa-
tion, designed to aid the mind in forming and maintaining heuristic formats
that are both spatial and visualizable’ (Carruthers 1990: 32). With the value
of the art of memory enhanced further by St Thomas Aquinas in the
thirteenth century (Samuel 1999: vii), religious scholars’ trained memories
were regarded as more reliable than the imperfect copies of manuscripts
scattered across Europe. The reliance of the Church on the art of memory
provided the central support for texts, while the layout of libraries imitated
the design of religious scholars’ memories (Yeo 2001: 80). Memory, because
of its identification with prudence, rigorous discipline and the highest
pursuits, was highly valued, although practiced mainly by the preaching
orders. All mnemonic systems underwent a process of Christianization,
as a result of which ‘the palaces of memory were replaced by abbeys and
cathedrals’, classical images were replaced by ‘such virtues as Chastity
and Moderation’, while memory became ‘the instrument for keeping in
mind liturgies and saints, heaven, hell and purgatory’ (Draaisma 2000: 41).
A new mnemonic landscape, associated with the sacred landmarks of
pilgrim routes, burial grounds, churches and shrines, became the essence
of the early Middle Ages. Medieval Christianity’s images of memory,
pictured as ‘a vast, immeasurable sanctuary’, or as a series of buildings
harmonized with the great Gothic churches (Yates 1966: 46). This con-
nection between the medieval period’s architectural style and the art of
memory’s imaginary canons resulted in ‘the Great Gothic artificial memories
of the Middle Ages’ (Yates 1966: xii) and illustrates the observation, which
opens this chapter, that each epoch finds its own expression and meaning in
memory (Hacking 1995: 200).

In the Renaissance, the art of memory expressed the period’s expanded
power of imagination and harmonized intellectually with its geometric
architecture (Yates 1966: 152-69). Although the humanist philosophers
rejected the art of memory, for the hermetic philosophers it still had a special
appeal as it allowed for the revival of the belief in the magical power of
memory, alchemy, astrology, cabalism, and magic. In this mystical tradition
of occult science, the magical practice of memory was conceptualized as a
kind of ‘ascent to the stars’ (Samuel 1994: ix) and became connected with

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 35

the issue of human immortality, with the result that spiritual theories of
memory gained in significance (Draaisma 2000: 60-4). The Renaissance
applications of the art of memory aimed to contain the ‘soul’ of things to
remember (Yates 1966: 140), and thus to provide ‘a way toward initiation
into a state of spiritual enlightenment’ (Hutton 1993: 19).

Soon, however, the relationship between memory and knowledge changed
and this led to a gradual but systematic erosion of the value put on memory.
Although in Bacon’s influential classification of knowledge, published in
The Advancement of Learning (1605), Memory, together with Imagination
and Reason, were presented as the main faculties, in the early modern period
the reliance on memory in the scientific field was already declining (Yeo
2001: 23). The role of memory was further diminished by the evolution
of the classical mnemonic system, which transmuted from a ‘method of
memorizing the encyclopaedia of knowledge, of reflecting the world in
memory’ to an instrument to help in the discovery of the world (Yates 1966:
185). Even more importantly, the art of memory was seen as ‘a method of
investigation and a method of logical investigation’ (Yates 1966: 185) and by
developing scholars’ need for the systematic organization of knowledge
‘may have trained them in the kind of systematic thinking, that made pos-
sible the scientific revolution’ (Hutton 1993: 12). With the spread of printing
and the expansion of knowledge, now understood not as accepted truth but
as an open search, the elaborate mnemonic techniques began to disappear,
while scientists rejected memory because ‘one does not require memory in all
science’ (Descartes, quoted in Le Goff 1992: 84). By the seventeenth century,
with the decline of the art of memory, the function of transmitting messages
from the past detached from the human voice and entrusted to books, and
with the increasing dissemination of printed historical texts, the ‘pastness’ of
the past slowly came to be appreciated.

The development of print culture, which ensured the standardization, dis-
semination and fixity of the text, underwrote the gradually established sta-
bility of the vision of the past (Eisenstein 1966). Additionally, the emergence
of this new awareness and appreciation of the past was assisted by the
Renaissance rediscovery of the classical world and the growing understand-
ing of antiquity as a different realm. This new method of understanding
antiquity was developed by the Renaissance humanists, who discovered that
‘the clearer the image of antiquity became, the less it seemed to resemble the
present’ (Lowenthal 1985: 232) and insisted on the critical reading of ‘the
pure text’ and the investigation of the authenticity of documents. While for
ancient or medieval authors, historical facts were atomic entities, immedi-
ately perceivable and understandable and hardly in need of interpretation,
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward a new perception of
historical facts emerged. Now, the historical fact was ‘not in and of itself
meaningful: only its context endows a historical fact with meaning and
significance. The context of historical facts is not at all given: it must be

36 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

reconstructed by the historian from other facts’ (Funkenstein 1993: 25). The
strengthening of this new perception of the past, which led finally to seeing
the past as a different realm, was further helped by the use of letters to
preserve memory, the establishment of archives (from the thirteenth cen-
tury), libraries, the dissemination of printed books, secularism and the
increasing scrutiny of evidence (Lowenthal 1985: 233). All these trends
gradually reinforced the importance of written documents beyond the
monopoly of a small elite, therefore textualizing the past and historicizing
memory in more concrete ways. By removing ideas, personalities and events
from the milieu of oral tradition and giving them a specific time and place in
collective memory, texts enabled readers to comprehend the historicity of
the past in a more profound way: ‘The textualization of collective memory
depended on the readers’ awareness of temporality, and this in turn led to
the recasting of mnemonic schemes, previously conceived spatially, onto
timelines on which historical events served as places of memory’ (Hutton
1993: 19). Nevertheless, the trend towards seeing the past as a different
realm was a slow process, as discrimination between ‘the mythical and his-
torical remained blurred for a full two centuries after printing’ (Eisenstein
1966:51).

In the Middle Ages, memory enjoyed a high status not only because it was
valued enormously as a container of virtues and an instrument of thought,
but also because of concern about loss of knowledge. Since until the eight-
eenth century even printed books were not perceived as a safe container of
knowledge (Yeo 2001: 80), medieval works sought to summarize and record
a stable body of knowledge, often by referring back to the vocal context
(Ong 1983: 311-13). In the monastic tradition of the Middle Ages, the
written word was treated differently as it was assumed that what was writ-
ten in books must eventually find its way into the personal memory, and
therefore the book was not regarded as an alternative to human memory,
but as an aid to memory (Carruthers 1990). However, the spread of dic-
tionaries and encyclopedias gave the public access to an enormous amount
of knowledge about the past, as well as the progress of science and phil-
osophy, and as a result transformed the role and content of memory (Le
Goff 1992: 81-5). From the end of the Middle Ages, mnemonics were not
invested ‘with any moral authority or stature’ (Hacking 1995: 203) and with
the early modern period came the realization ‘that knowledge, even the most
important parts of it, could no longer be held in memory’ (Yeo 2001: 78).
During the Enlightenment, the art of memory was rejected in favour of
observation, experience, intelligence and reason, which meant the end of the
art of memory and the emergence of a clear difference between the mythical
and the historical.

Although during the Enlightenment the mnemonic technique lost its
standing, a concern with memory continued in many philosophical works.
For example, John Locke famously discussed connections between personal

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 37

identity and memory as well as the role of emotion in recovering memory.
Nonetheless, as Hacking (1995: 203) notes, in the seventeenth century ‘there
was no systematic attempt to uncover facts about memory’. Yet, as the
arenas for religious and political activity were broadening and as many
fundamental issues became subjects of dispute, the rivalry over who owned
memory and whose vision of the past was to be honoured in official
memorials and monuments became one of the most important political
issues, first in England and later in all modern societies.

Memory in modern society

The history of memory since the eighteenth century has been influenced by
many factors, including new technological developments, the advent of a
middle-class readership, a growing detachment from religious worldviews,
an increasing process of industrialization and urbanization, as well as
nationalism. All these trends led to expansion of the possibility of abstract
thought and produced a new awareness of the distinctiveness of history
(Olick and Robbins 1998: 110-12). Since it is beyond our capacity to dis-
cuss all these changes here, in this section we only briefly summarize the
main trends related to the history of memory in this period.

The eighteenth century was a unique period in the history of memory
because at that time the meaning of memory at once broadened and dimin-
ished. First, within this period the vast advancement of literacy and the
expansion of sciences gradually expanded memory. As there was a lot more
of the past, many historians, influenced by the Ciceronian model of rhet-
orical history, assembled ‘beautifully written tales for the reading public’
(Arnold 2000: 47, 52). The progressive mass of information produced by
increasingly specialized disciplines and the multiplication of books meant
that memory, however finely trained, was no longer an adequate container
of knowledge (Yeo 2001: 80-7). This realization, that individual memory
could not cope with the expansion of knowledge, provided a new rationale
for the publication of dictionaries and encyclopedias, and the creation of
museums, archives and libraries, which were supposed to condense and
preserve knowledge and memories. Although encyclopedias of the Enlighten-
ment sought to provide a solution to the situation in which there were too
many books and nobody could be expected to remember the content of
whole libraries, this does not mean that they were envisaged in strictly
instrumental terms, or merely as ‘machines that remember for us’ (Van
Doren, quoted in Yeo 2001: 116). However, with the still prevailing con-
viction that educated persons should attempt to embrace a range of science,
Enlightenment encyclopedias were nevertheless designed to bring ‘an
increasingly rich technical, scientific and intellectual memory’ to the reader
(LeGoff 1992: 85).

38 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Second, the Enlightenment undermined the authority of memory by
making it clear in an ‘encyclopedic tree’, which replaced Bacon’s classifica-
tion of knowledge, that reason, not memory, ‘controlled the largest number
of arts and sciences’ (Yeo 2001: 28). Third, the Enlightenment weakened the
importance and status of memory as it set out to destroy the authority
of tradition, seen as associated with backwardness and reactionary beliefs.
Elistorians, who believed that their age surpassed any previous period in
knowledge, not only studied the past but also made judgements upon it.
Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, ‘the past did not live up to their high
expectations’ (Arnold 2000: 52). The appeal of the notion of rationality and
progress meant that the past was viewed as the bastion of ignorance and
irrational tradition: ‘The first entry of the agenda of the Enlightenment was
therefore to do away with traditionality as such’ (Shils 1981: 6). Seeing
history as a kind of continuous progress of reason and knowledge gave
tradition a bad name and resulted in a lack of interest in memories of the
past. The belief that progress could be achieved through the development
and application of scientific knowledge enhanced a fascination with the
future and promoted a rejection of the traditional past. With the Enlighten-
ment theorists’ dislike of tradition, western societies of the eighteenth cen-
tury displayed interest neither in how the past works nor in commemoration
rituals (Aries 1981).

However, since the late eighteenth century, with the invention of the
‘nation state’, the political demands on memory have been strong in all West-
ern European countries. With the emergence of many European nationalist
movements it became clear that a ‘free nation needs national celebrations’
(Gambetta 1872 quoted in Le Goff 1992: 87). Consequently, each nation
created its own commemorations, and supplied the collective memories with
monuments of remembrance and new traditions, which were deliberately
designed to symbolize national unity, to ensure state legitimacy and build
political consensus. The expansion of the state’s role in shaping and main-
taining a nation’s narrative of collective historical experience was most pro-
nounced in France, where the 1789 Revolution, by providing the nation
with an origin myth, became a founding moment for the historical imagery
of the country (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 128-33). After the Revolu-
tion, the French constitution declared that: ‘National celebrations will be
established to preserve the memory of the French Revolution’ (Le Goff
1992: 86). The revolutionary fascination with antiquity and French history
resulted in an increased focus on the past, with the art in this period con-
sequently becoming a ‘factory of the past’ (Le Goff 1992: 15). The French
state organized and articulated narratives enhancing its legitimization
through the introduction of a new calendar (which aimed to create a dis-
tinctive rhythm of social life that unified a group through shared recollec-
tion), celebrations and commemorations, all seen as powerful means to
mark the discontinuity between the past and the present, between a former

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 39

regime and a new one: ‘All the calendar-makers and celebration-makers
agree on the necessity of using the festival to maintain the memory of the
Revolution’ (Ozouf 1988: 199). The national celebration, anthem and flag
became means to symbolize the uniqueness of the nation and were used in
the service of national memory. From that moment on, state-designed and
state-sponsored commemoration practices multiplied, while the style of
celebrations broadened, particularly with the use of coins, medals, postage
stamps, monuments and memorial days as new means of commemoration
(Ozouf 1988). During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, state pat-
ronage resulted in raising monuments which focused public attention on the
aspirations of the state. At the same time, these eras initiated the democra-
tization of memory by erecting memorials not to kings or generals but to
ordinary warriors, with the first monuments to dead soldiers constructed in
Lucerne and dedicated to the memory of members of the Swiss Guard killed
on 10 August 1792 (Laqueur 1994: 159). The Third Republic also con-
tinued the construction of an official memory by developing, for example,
secular education designed to replace religion as a source of collective iden-
tity, with Republican values and memory. The Republic likewise manipu-
lated the practice of national unity by inventing public commemorative
celebrations to enhance officially approved memories and to propagate the
state glory. For instance, Bastille Day was ‘invented’ only in 1880, more
than 90 years after the actual event took place (Hobsbawm 1983: 271).

In contrast, the continuity of the British state and a lack of comparable
state patronage did not produce new commemorative practices, official
holidays or patriotic celebrations. However, by the seventeenth century
there was a insistent focus on public memory in England which was used for
political and religious purposes. At this time, England’s past became ‘an
issue of many political discourses, which revolved around interpretation,
celebration and control of the past’ (Cressy 1994: 61). A resulting accom-
plished vision of the past was incorporated into the calendar, reiterated in
sermons, and exhibited in memorials and monuments. By the end of seven-
teenth century, following the English governments’ construction and
manipulation of national memory, ‘a canon of memories that once bound
the nation to its crown and its church had become the contested ground for
rival ideologies and faith’ (Cressy 1994: 71). In the next century, the break
with the past brought about by the industrial revolution was remembered by
all classes: ‘Memory was central to the making of English working-class
identities as it was to the class consciousness of the British bourgeoisie, both
of which were constructed in the nineteenth century’ (Gillis 1994b: 8).

The nineteenth-century trade union movement in England established its
own labour rituals, celebrations and parades, while the bourgeoisie
expressed its civic pride by collecting national treasures and contributing to
the creation of museums. The British Museum, founded in 1753 when par-
liament voted to buy, with public money and gifts, a vast private collection,

40 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

was quite different from the collections of the previous century, not only
because it was ‘the strongest, and not only in art and antiquity, but also in
natural history’, but also because its intellectual rationale was rooted in
the wealthy middle-class belief in progress, knowledge and ‘the idea of the
present as the product of the past’ (Pearce 1992: 100-1). The creation of
museums in most cities and large towns in Britain can be seen as the mani-
festation of the civic pride of the emerging middle classes, whose national-
ism expressed itself in the celebration of the lives of great men and artists.
Also the National Trust, created at the end of the nineteenth century as a
bulwark of the aristocracy, soon became a middle-class heritage mass
movement (Wright 1985; Hewison 1987).

The further expansion of social movements concerned with conservation
and heritage, together with the rise of an enthusiasm for voluntary subscrip-
tion for the construction of monuments commemorating national heroes,
suggests that national memory was created not just from the sense of a break
with the past. Public monuments at the beginning of the nineteenth century
‘were a means of expressing the emerging national and civic pride of
the British people, particularly in expanding provincial towns and cities’
(Yarrington 1988: 326). In the second part of the nineteenth century, as the
public directed its attention towards monuments of men of peace, local
demands for neoclassical monuments of war heroes decreased. It can be said
that modern British memory was born ‘from an intense awareness of the
conflicting representations of the past and the effort of each group to make
its version the basis of national identity’ (Gillis 1994b: 8), while the wealth
of the nation created conducive conditions for a public interest in the past.

The nineteenth-century citizen’s civic pride was closely linked with the
growing significance of history, which, fuelled by the ascendancy of positiv-
ism, established itself as a ‘scientific’ discipline. History, being hostile to
abstraction and generalization, aimed to describe the past as it ‘actually had
been’, as famously expressed by Teopold von Ranke (Tosh 1991: 13-16).
National historians enjoyed the status of ‘cultural priests’ and their work
was ‘read by a wide stratum of the educated public’ (Funkenstein 1993: 20).
As the nation state replaced ‘the sacred liturgical memory with the secular
liturgical memory - days of remembrance, flags, and monuments’, the task
of the national historian was to make ‘the symbols concrete’ (Funkenstein
1993: 20). In their efforts to separate history as a secular academic practice
from a background of cultural religiosity, nineteenth-century historians
‘identified memories as a dubious source for the verification of historical
facts’ (Klein 2000: 130). This suspicion of memories led historians to reject
myth-making about the past and to rely on written documents. Yet, at the
same time, ballads, proverbs, legends and songs (e.g. the Arthurian tradition
in England) were making their way into the national history (Samuel 1994:
442-3). This appeal of popular memory can be seen as a result of the state’s
interest in history’s ability to promote a national identity as well as the

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 41

product of the new Romantic movement, which deliberately turned toward
the past.

Following the earlier interest in antiquity, and rejecting the notion of
uniformity among all cultures, the Romantic movement declared that each
historical period had a unique character. Arguing that differences between
the present and the past were incommensurable (Lowenthal 1985: 233),
Romanticism rediscovered the attraction of memory as well as the links
between memory and imagination, and memory and poetry. At the heart of
the Romantic movement in nineteenth-century Europe was the concept of
memory as a power of the soul, a nostalgia for the past and a focus on the
imaginative power of memory. The idea of cultural diversity as intrinsic to
human history, as expressed by Herder, meant that history does not move in
straight lines, and that ‘there is not a single key to the future or the past’
(Berlin 1999: 36).

The Romantics claimed that each human group must strive after ‘what lies
in its bones’, and concluded that other cultures could be understood with the
help of empathic imagination (Berlin 1999: 66). For Herder, for example, a
nation was not a state but a cultural entity whose members spoke the same
language, possessed the same habits, had a communal past and common
memories (Berlin 1999: 62-7). In this way, Romanticism destroyed the
Enlightenment’s axiom that if we apply proper scientific methods, valid and
objective answers will be discovered to all questions and therefore a correct,
perfect pattern of life taught to people: ‘Romanticism built on time’s ruin. Its
idea of memory was premised on a sense of loss. It divorced memory-work
from any claim to science, assigning it instead to the realm of the intuitive
and instinctual’ (Samuel 1994: ix). The passion of Romantic literature
for memory, seen as a synonym for the notion of the spirit or the ‘inner’
character of the nation, was accompanied by an unprecedented interest
in commemoration in Western European culture (Aries 1981), which
contributed to the emergence of many European nationalist movements.

In contrast to the heyday of Romanticism, when memory could be
described ‘as a landscape full of woods and streams, ravines and plateaux,
skies and gleaming lakes’, at the end of the nineteenth century memory
became the subject of experimental research (Draaisma 2000: 97). The
memory discourse in this period was dominated by the metaphor of evo-
lutionary progress in nature. The power of this naturalizing metaphor was
so widespread that it can be said that memory at the time was ‘first of all the
story of an organism’ (Matsuda 1996: 7). Darwin’s concept of biological
time, with its emphasis on conflict, competition and inheritance in evo-
lutionary progress, shaped ways of thinking about memory. With the intro-
duction of this ‘hereditary and species memory into the traditional memories
of rhetoric and language’, memory was represented as a physical organism.
Numerous evolutionary theorists, attempted to operationalize memory in
biological terms as an inheritable or ‘racial’ characteristic (Assmann 1995),

42 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

or conceived it as ‘an objective indicator of inferiority’ (Hacking 1995: 201).
The biological-evolutionary reading of life histories also influenced Karl
Marx’s conceptualization of memory. Ideological dimensions of the evo-
lutionary vision of progress, which implied a vision of the past as an ‘unend-
ing record of pains and struggles which formed us into the creatures we are
now’, strengthened Marx’s aversion to nostalgia and prompted him to
denounce memory as false consciousness (Sennett 1998: 11). In his The
Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx, claiming that ‘the tradition of the dead gener-
ations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’, rejects the
reactionary ‘cult of the past’ as well as the French people’s nostalgia for
the past and their inability to ‘get rid of the memory of Napoleon’, and
declares that the ‘drama of the French, therefore also the workers, is in great
memories’ ([1852] 1973: 248).

In the late nineteenth century, with the process of the secularization of
thinking about the human mind underway, neurobiological studies of the
functioning of memory, combined with experimental studies of recall and
the psychodynamics of memory contributed to the development of empirical
investigations of memory. These studies were underpinned by the assump-
tion that there is objective scientific knowledge about memory. This has led,
according to Hacking (1995), to the replacement of moral and spiritual
reflection on the soul with empirical facts about memory. Memory, as the
instrument through which positivist science sought to secularize the soul,
has become the subject of the new sciences of memory which have pro-
foundly influenced western culture. Laboratory work on recall, anatomical
and statistical studies of memory, investigations in experimental psychology
and pathological psychiatry all provided new knowledge about memory, as
opposed to the art of memory, which taught us how to remember (Hacking
1995: 201). Being creatures of the nineteenth century, and being rooted in
the French culture of the period, these sciences tried in a systematic way to
uncover facts about memory and to establish scientific laws about its subject
by studying pathological memory and forgotten traumas. Since then, forget-
ting rather than remembering has continued to be seen as the factor that
‘forms our character, our personality, our soul’ (Hacking 1995: 209).

The nineteenth century was a time of the great technological develop-
ment. New inventions and new machines were ‘defining characteristics of
late nineteenth century European memory’ (Matsuda 1996: 13). The spread
of new technologies, such as photography, radiography and cinema cameras
revolutionized ways of preserving and recalling memory. After 1839, human
memory became compared to a photographic plate containing a record of
our visual experience. By the 1880s the idea of a ‘photographed reality’ was
a familiar means of recording the past (Caldwell 2000: 40). Photography
became accepted as ‘a vessel of accuracy, authenticity, verisimilitude, and
truth’ (Zelizer 1998: 9). In contrast to a painting or a piece of prose, a
photograph was seen as realistic and objective, while also guaranteeing

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 43

longevity: ‘Memorialising the achievements of individuals considered as
members of families is the earliest popular use of photography’ (Sontag
2001: 43). The conceptualization of memory as ‘images photographed upon
the object itself’ (Bergson quoted in Sherman 1999: 13) was further secured
by the development of cinematography in 1895. As the eyes of the camera
recorded experience, the collection of images captured on film resulted in a
new opportunity to preserve images (Sontag 2001) and see them move. With
the preservation of sound, following the invention of the phonograph by
Edison in 1877, we had ‘armed ourselves against the transience implicit
in the mortality of memory by developing artificial memories’ (Draaisma
2000 : 2 ).

All these new means of storing and preserving historical events resulted in
the proliferation of documents and archives. Those were used by various
institutions, such as the medical profession and the police to record names,
dates and cases. The institutionalization of memory in archives and
museums, the increased opportunity, due to technological innovation, to
keep a record of the past, combined with the fascination of nationalist
movements with the past, the proliferation of national histories, a grow-
ing interest in the medieval past and the growing sophistication of histori-
cal methods made the nineteenth century ‘the century of history’ (Le Goff
1992: 15).

However, not all thinkers of that period accorded history such a promin-
ent status. For instance, Nietzsche (1983), who rejected the view that mean-
ing is revealed in history, saw memory as the imposition of values that
become fixed and obligatory. He spoke about the ‘heaviness’ of history and
stressed how the sheer volume of the past could weigh on the present, warn-
ing that an excess of history could destroy humanity. This new uncertainty
about the relation of the present to the past, signalled the emergence of a
crisis of memory, defined as people’s experience of ‘the insecurity of their
culture’s involvement with its past, the perturbation of the link to their own
inheritance’ (Terdiman 1993: 3).

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as a result of a
massive disruption of traditional forms of memory, a feeling of anxiety
about memory emerged as the dominant trend. In traditional societies,
people’s past and their conduct were open to easy interpretation as they
carried ‘their pasts and their meanings openly’ (Terdiman 1993: 6). In con-
trast, in modern societies, due to a lack of transparency of the past resulting
from the fact that people were disconnected from their past, the inter-
pretation of people’s behaviour became notoriously problematic. This
increasing crisis of memory was further enhanced by upheavals in European
societies which at that time were undergoing rapid industrialization, urban-
ization and modernization, as well as by a new questioning of the idea of
‘progress’. Consequently, these processes led to the destruction of tradition
and the insecurity of a culture’s involvement with its past. The decline of

44 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

oral traditions in villages, the rise of the popular press and the extension of
compulsory education transformed the status of memory and the ways in
which memory was preserved.

This crisis of memory manifested itself in an overwhelming sense of loss,
anxiety and uncertainty, with the past being rejected on the one hand and
appreciated as a lost mentality on the other (Terdiman 1993). The increasing
tendency in this period to construct memory in physical monuments seems
to be ‘symptomatic of an increasing anxiety about memory left to its own
unseen devices’ (Savage 1994: 130). Matsuda (1996) speaks likewise of a
memory discourse, which emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe as a
response to the acceleration of history. Moreover, people’s alienation from
their past grew as modernism distanced itself from the past. As the connec-
tion between the past and the present grew uncertain, people tried to find a
remedy in the ‘vigorous and sensitive cultivation of historical understand-
ing’, replacing ‘intellectual certainty by an emotional cohesion with which
all experiences of the past could coexist’ (Lowenthal 1985: 376).

Modernism’s desire to ‘wipe out whatever came earlier’ paradoxically
generated a greater dependence on the past - hence modernity’s indecisive
affiliations with memory (de Man 1970: 387-96). On the one hand, these
relations manifested themselves in modernity’s preoccupation with memory,
and on the other in its orientation towards the future and its dislike of
tradition. While modern science in general liberated itself from the guardian-
ship of memory, some disciplines’ interest in memory grew. In psycho-
analysis (Freud) and in philosophy (Bergson) the most influential works on
the topic of memory were created (see Chapters 5 and 6 for further discus-
sion). For psychoanalysis, which can be seen as ‘our culture’s last Art
Memory’, memory has been both the problem and the core of its solution
(Terdiman 1993: 240-1). Yet memory was absent from the social sciences,
with the majority of scientists following the prejudices of the Enlightenment
and rejecting tradition. Despite the widespread discussion of memory in late
nineteenth-century culture, the ‘classical’ sociological theorists hardly
mentioned it, as they believed that memory was a feature of pre-modern
societies, and that in modern society, seen as on the road to ‘traditionless-
ness’, memory had no significance. Weber (1978), for example, argued that
traditional modes of belief and conduct could not help us to stand up against
the power of rationality and to stop the inevitable process of rationalization,
and therefore were irrelevant for the modern world.

There were also opposing orientations to the role of memory in the artistic
world. On the one hand, the nineteenth century avant-garde was interested
solely in the future, invention, innovation and originality: ‘The attack of
the avant-garde was directed mainly against the store-room of collective
memory: museums, libraries and academies’ (Connerton 1989: 62). The
avant-garde artists’ demands, most stridently expressed in the manifestos of
the futurists, called for the primacy of forgetting, and denounced museums

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 45

as cemeteries and libraries as burial chambers. On the other hand, the role
of memory was emphasized in many literary works proposing to look at
memory not in historical terms but rather as an act of imagination. The best
example here is Proust’s seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past,
the first volume of which was published just before World War I.

The most important changes in attitudes towards the past were brought
about by World War, I, which created the 1914 generation’s new ideas
and perception of temporality as well as a new memory of war (Fussell
1975; Wohl 1979). For Walter Benjamin (1968), the war experience was a
decisive moment in a longer-term trend, typified by a decline of storytelling
that left people without the possibility to tell their tales and without com-
municable experiences to tell. However, the war, or ‘shock’ generally as the
hallmark of modern experience, is also, according to Benjamin, a category
of awakening, as it disrupts life’s complacent conviction of its own
immortality. Thus, the experience of the Great War engendered not only
forgetfulness but also a distinctive form of memory. The war’s myth, sup-
plied with coherence by literary narratives, upgraded the status of national
memory. The memory of the war, by becoming ‘the total cultural form of
our present life’, established a new form of memory, where the culture of the
past was ‘our own buried life’ (Fussell 1975: 335). The war influenced the
nature of commemoration practices, forms of war memorial and types of
mourning (Winter 1995). Widespread state-sponsored commemorative
practices after the war (which, for example in France, practically left no
town without a war memorial) (Sherman 1994), were exploited by national-
ist leaders to create an identification of states with mass memory. In all
countries, the ‘We’ who should remember ‘Them’ were mourning the loss by
erecting so-called tombs of unknown soldiers, thereby ‘remembering every-
one by remembering no one in particular’ (Gillis 1994b: 11). As the memory
of the Great War became materialized in a single place, individual and fam-
ily memories of the dead were ‘to be blended and given purpose by identifi-
cation with collective expressions presided over by the state’ (Gray and
Oliver 2001: 14). The interplay between private and collective memories, so
characteristic of these type of practice, contributed to the democratization of
the cult of the dead, and this further enhanced the impersonalization of
national memory (Gillis 1994a).

In the interwar period, the debate about memory entered the field of
sociology. The publication of Maurice Halbwachs’ Les Cadres Socioaux de
la Memoir e in 1924 established memory as an object of sociological study
and shifted the conceptualization of memory out of a biological framework
and into a cultural one (Assmann 1995). Halbwachs’ observation that the
advent of capitalism and technology brought about the gradual alignment
of all spheres of social life on the sphere of production, led him to suspect
that the more advanced societies become, the more collective memory
disintegrates ([1941J 1992). In other words, the development of industrial

46 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

capitalism is seen as causing the disintegration and functionalization of col-
lective memory in modern societies. This relationship, argues Halbwachs,
can be attributed to two processes. First, it is an effect of the expansion and
homogenization of collective memory that can be explained by the growing
specialization and differentiation of modern societies. The emergence of the
bourgeoisie and the modern capitalist economy, in particular, are seen as
responsible for the destruction of a social framework and depth of collec-
tive memory (Halbwachs [1941J 1992: 115-25). Thus, at the end of ‘this
homogenizing, functionalizing process, the memory of modern societies
took on the aspect of surface memory, dull memory, whose normative cre-
ative capacity seems to have dissolved’ (Hervieu-Leger 2000: 128).

Second, the disintegration of collective memory in modern societies can be
seen as a result of the process of the destruction of a social framework that
ensured the transmission of collective memories from one generation to the
next; a process brought about by the contemporary fragmentation of space,
time and institutions, as well as by the growing number and plurality of
groups to which individuals belong. Halbwachs’ argument that modern
societies are less capable of maintaining the common stock of memory
provides us with a good opportunity to finish this chapter with a short
discussion of collective memory in modern societies, which will be further
developed in Chapter 6.

Memory today

Today’s societies are often seen as those in which one no longer finds a
minimal continuum of memory, or those in which life is not tradition-
informed, past-oriented and memory-rich. This collapse of the comprehen-
sive collective memory is, however, accompanied by a the fascination with
memory. Thus, the end of the twentieth century, in a remarkably similar
way to the end of the nineteenth, was characterized by a memory crisis. On
the one hand, the cultural demise of authoritative memory has meant that
contemporary societies have been described as ‘terminally ill with amnesia’
(Huyssen 1995: 1), ‘amnesic’ (Hervieu-Leger 2000) and ‘without a living
memory’ (Nora 1996a), where the anniversaries and celebrations of the past
are only media events (Collini 1999) and where there is no historical aware-
ness or knowledge (Lowenthal 1998). On the other hand, they are described
as suffering from an ‘obsession with memory’ and going through ‘museu-
mania and exhibition craze’ (Huyssen 1995: 7, 21) the epidemic of com-
memoration and a passion for heritage. Even more importantly, the decline
of comprehensive memory is accompanied by the spread of community-
based small memories, which absorb the need for identity, and by the
emergence of extra-territorial global memories, which are facilitated by
‘the speed and imagery of the new global communications (Levy and

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 47

Sznaider 2002: 91). Consequently, we witness a process of denationaliz-
ation of memory as well as trends towards the fragmentation and democra-
tization of memory. As previously marginalized groups have access to
resources and to the public space to cultivate and express their memories,
they undermine, in turn, the authoritative memory of the dominant culture.
This process of the expansion of various group memories, in the context of
the growing importance of the politics of identity, has resulted in the politi-
cization of memory. Hence, as memory becomes a significant element in the
development of social and cultural identities, it establishes itself as not only
a source of a sense of lineage and inheritance, but also as identities’ sole
justification and legitimization. This process, furthermore, often leads to
the sacralization of memory, or memory becoming a ‘surrogate’ religion.
The enhancement of the sacrality of memory manifests itself not only in the
growing significance of group memories but also in the proliferation of
conservation movements, museums and heritage sites (see Chapter 1).

In the past 50 years historic sites around the globe have multiplied from
thousands to millions and 95 per cent of existing museums postdate
World War II (Lowenthal 1998: 3-8). The growth of the number of private
and public collections and museums has been followed by the expansion of
the ‘heritage industry’ - that is, ‘the instrumental (commercially and/or
state-founded) use of representations and activities centred upon memorial-
ising, preserving or re-enacting the past in order to protect and project a
nation’s inheritance’ (Evans 1999: 5). Britain, where popular enthusiasm for
the past has been visible since the 1960s, is seen increasingly as manufactur-
ing heritage instead of manufacturing goods (Hewison 1999). The growing
significance of heritage, with the National Trust having over 2 million mem-
bers, making it the largest mass organization in Britain (Urry 1996: 60), can
be explained by a loss of trust in the future and an ageing society’s nostalgia
for a golden past. It can also be seen as motivated by economic interest as a
commodified heritage benefits local economies (Hewison 1987). This devo-
tion to the past has, however, undergone a social transformation from a
conservative nostalgia and desire to preserve the past to a more democratic
representation of the past (Samuel 1999). Moreover, the past can also be
recreated for popular entertainment, as it is argued that ‘the exploration of
the past need not be a serious endeavour, requiring time and commitment,
but should be in essence undemanding and diverting’ (MacGregor, quoted in
Rojek 1999: 201). This trend expresses itself particularly in the development
of various theme parks, which aim to bring the past to life by immersing
people in direct sensory experiences. As the heritage industry enjoys new
developments, takes on new functions and moves to storing and presenting
cultural heritage in a digital form, it also faces new threats connected with its
further commercialization.

New demands for the recreation of the past and for entertainment, as well
as the availability of new technologies, have also changed the role of the

48 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

museum and its modes of exhibiting. As the information age offers us access
to images and more interactive ways of displaying exhibits, museums have
become less like traditional archives and more like interactive libraries,
while at the same time new archives’ capacities for collection and filing are
unlimited. Integrated digital systems have enriched our access to archives,
museums and libraries, and the potential for greater visual literacy has also
been expanded by the provision online exhibitions and new ways of collect-
ing, storing and producing memories. The personal testimony constitutes
the favoured form of memory production in many museums, as its ‘intensely
individuated meanings differentiate it from the monument, remembrance
day or other “official” and collective markers of memory’ (Ashplant et al.
2000b: 48). Projects of generating memory are now technologically complex
and often include clips of oral testimonies and video interviews. One of the
most fully developed memory projects is the Holocaust archive - a collec-
tion of 3400 witness accounts organized by the Fortunoff Video Archive and
50,000 testimonies collected by Steven Spielberg’s Visual History of the
Shoah Foundation.

The role of the media has also undergone change as a result of new tech-
nologies, which have increased our ability to store and transmit memory,
allowing more freedom and creative possibilities. These new developments
have been preparing us for the arrival of cosmopolitan memory (Levy and
Sznaider 2002). However, although we witness the decline of the role of the
media in legitimizing the nation, it remains - through its ability to create
‘master narratives’ and to make journalists into ‘authoritative spokes-
persons for the story’(Zelizer 1993) - the main source of images of the past.
Our growing reliance on new electronic means of communication (from TV
to the internet) for memory-keeping and memory-construction makes us
dependent on media representations of the past. Our contact with the past
increasingly takes place through the electronic media, which are based upon
a presupposition that they, unlike the press which reports and comments,
represent the world (Tester 1999: 470). Generally, the importance and the
nature of mass media have established the new role of mediated and delocal-
ized traditions as a means of making sense of the world and creating a sense
of belonging.

By presenting the changes in aids to memory, from visual mnemonic tech-
niques, through writing and print, to today’s means of storage, transition
and construction of memory, this chapter has illustrated how cultures have
been affected by the shift in the means of communication and social organ-
ization. It has shown changes in the status and meanings of memory, from
its mythical and sacred status in antiquity, through its high position in the
pre-modern period where memory was seen as source of knowledge and
truth, to the erosion of its value in modernity. The history of memory reveals
changes in the custodianship of remembering, from the religious authorities,
through the state to the media. In order to further clarify social rules of

METAMORPHOSIS OF MEMORY 49

remembering the next chapter will examine sociological theories of collect-
ive memory.

Further reading

Hacking, I. (1995) Rewriting the Soul. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. (1983) Mass-producing traditions: Europe, 1870-1914, in
E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, pp. 263-308.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Le Goff, J. (1992) History and Memory, trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country, Ch. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Matsuda, M.K. (1996) The Memory of the Modern. New York: Oxford University
Press.

CHAPTER 3

THEORIZING REMEMBERING

This chapter discusses four main theories of remembering. It starts with a
short presentation of the Durkheimian perspective, paying particular atten-
tion to Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory. This is followed by a dis-
cussion of the presentist tradition which assumes that images of the past are
strategically invented to suit present needs. The third part describes work on
social memory which argues for a more complex view of the relation between
the past and the present and between the dominant, or official, memory and
popular memory. The final section presents some recent studies that con-
ceptualize memory as actively restructured in a process of negotiations
through time.

Halbwachs: the social context of memory

Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), as we have already mentioned, is respon-
sible for the introduction of the concept of collective memory into the socio-
logical vocabulary. Despite Halbwachs’ highly original argument about the
social context of collective memory, his books, Les Cadres Socioanx de la
Memorie ( [1941 J 1992 ) La Topographie Legendaire des Evangiles en Terre
Sainte (1941) and the posthumously published The Collective Memory
([1926] 1950), were neglected for a long time. Halbwachs, who was also the
first to systematically explore the ways in which present concerns determine
what of the past we remember, continued the legacy of Durkheim’s belief
that every society displays and requires a sense of continuity with the past.
His affinity with Durkheim’s ideas is also clearly visible in his emphasis on
the collective nature of social consciousness and his assertion that a collect-
ively imagined past is crucial for the unity of a society, while a shared past is
the essential element for the reconstruction of social solidarity. Halbwachs,

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 51

like Durkheim, assumes the persistence of what is remembered, as the
function of remembering is not to transform the past but to promote a
commitment to the group by symbolizing its values and aspirations.

Yet Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory is more than a mere appli-
cation of Durkheim’s theorizing of collective memory as a social fact that
confers identity on individuals and groups. Whereas Durkheim mentions
memory solely in relation to traditional societies, which want to preserve a
sacred memory of their origin, Halbwachs insists on the importance of
memory in all types of society and argues that modern societies might prefer
to refashion their past in order to further some present political objective.
Halbwachs, moreover, expands Durkheim’s idea of collective memory
beyond its original connection with rituals. While Durkheim addresses
memory directly only in his discussion of commemorative rituals, the notion
of memory stands at the heart of Halbwachs’ approach. Halbwachs enriches
Durkheim’s theory even further by uncovering and classifying the elements
of social life that contribute to collective memory.

Halbwachs’ ([1 941 J 1992) fundamental contribution to the study of
social memory is the establishment of the connection between a social group
and collective memory. His assertion that every group develops a memory of
its own past that highlights its unique identity is still the starting point for all
research in the field. Collective memory is, according to Halbwachs, always
‘socially framed’ since social groups determine what is ‘memorable’ and
how it will be remembered: ‘The individual calls recollections to mind by
relying on the frameworks of social memory’ (Halbwachs [1941] 1992:
182). For instance, individual memories of one’s family cannot be dissoci-
ated from the whole images that comprise the ‘family memory’. Halbwachs
([1926] 1950) also notices the relationship between the duration of a group
and its memory. He argues that a group memory lasts only as long the group
and that the prominence, and therefore also the duration, of a collective
memory depends on the social power of the group that holds it. The social
standing of the group provides an important indicator of its memory’s
durability, visibility and power, while the diversity and variable intensity of
individual remembrance is explained by the existence of a multiplicity of
collective influences.

Moreover, collective memory is by definition multiple because there are as
many memories as groups. In other words, when there is a plurality of social
frameworks or a multiplicity of memberships, there are many memories.
The succession of remembrances and the plurality of memories are the result
of changes occurring in our relationship to various collective milieus: my
memory changes ‘as my position changes’ and ‘this position itself changes as
my relationships to other milieus change’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 48).
Through all these changes groups need stable supports and frames of refer-
ence that enable them to rediscover the past in the present and feel their own
continuity. Consequently, ‘every collective memory requires the support of a

52 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

group delimited in space and time’ (Halbwachs [1926J 1950: 84). Both time
(see Chapter 5) and space (see Chapter 1) play a crucial role in anchoring
group recollections and hence in ensuring their preservation. Halbwachs
([1941J 1992: 172) notes that time and space are imposed upon us, and that
from this comes a ‘feeling of a reality’ - that is, the point of departure for all
our acts of memory. A group colonizes time by ordering important dates
within a commemorative sequence. By conforming the past to its concep-
tions, the group’s memory conveys an illusion of timelessness and continu-
ity. The preservation of recollections also rests on their anchorage in space,
which - because of its relative stability - gives us the illusion of permanence:
‘The group’s image of its external milieu and its stable relationships with this
environment become paramount in the idea it forms of itself’ (Halbwachs
[1926] 1950: 13). Furthermore, the reason members of a group remain
united, even after the group is dispersed, ‘is that they think of the old home
and its lay-out’. In other words, the spatial image alone, by reason of its
stability, gives us ‘an illusion of not having changed through time and of
retrieving the past in the present’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 157).

According to Halbwachs ([1926] 1950), the persistence of memory, as the
shared image of the past, which is a part of group common consciousness,
explains the group’s continuity. Halbwachs’ theory views collective memory
as ‘a record of resemblance’ which ensures that ‘the group remains the same’
([1926] 1950: 86), while asserting that a group’s identity has the central
input into the process of the reconstruction of ‘an image of the past which is
in accord . . . with the predominant thoughts of that group’ ([1926] 1950:
84). Collective identity precedes memory, therefore social identity deter-
mines the content of collective memory. Collective memory, being both a
shared image of a past and the reflection of the social identity of the group
that framed it, views events from a single committed perspective and thus
ensures solidarity and continuity. It seems that Halbwachs’ concern with the
Durkheimian conception of solidarity and moral consensus leads him to
argue that a group’s memory is a manifestation of their identity.

Thus, memory is not only plural and changeable but is also a crucial
condition of social order and solidarity. Halbwachs illustrates a link
between collective memory and social solidarity on a national scale by
showing that shared stories define the nature and boundaries of entire
societies to whom the stories belong. Although he is aware that ‘Ordinarily,
the nation is too remote from the individual for him to consider the history
of his country as anything else than a very large framework with which his
own history makes contact at only few points’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950:
77), he argues that there are certain events that ‘alter group life’ and there-
fore that collective memory can play a solidifying role in societies ([1926]
1950: 62). So, despite the fact that ‘between individual and nation lie many
other, more restricted groups’ ([1926] 1950: 77), each with its own history,
there is the possibility of a link between collective memory and social

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 53

solidarity on a national scale. The underlining argument is that a stable
identity, personal or national, rests on an awareness of continuity with a
beloved past.

For Halbwachs, collective memory is carried and supported by a group,
while an individual memory can be understood only by connecting ‘the
individual to the various groups of which he is simultaneously a member’
([1941J 1992: 53). Individual remembrance is seen as ‘the intersection of
collective influences’ ([1926] 1950: 44) or as the meeting point of networks
of solidarity of which the person is a part. Such a conceptualization of
individual memory means that individual remembrance changes as the indi-
vidual’s affiliation changes. In other words, memories adapt to our present
connections, belongings and positions and therefore only we can be sure of
the accuracy of our memory when it is supported by others’ remembrances.
Only in the group context are we able to ‘reconstruct a body of remem-
brances’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 22) and more accurately describe past
events. Only when people come together to remember do they enter a
domain beyond that of individual memory (Halbwachs [1941] 1992:
45-56). Although collective memory encompasses individual memories, it
always remains distinct from them and evolves according to its own laws.
Furthermore, in recollection, we do not retrieve images of the past as they
were originally perceived but rather as they fit into our present conceptions,
which in turn are shaped by the social forces that act on us. Thus, only by
recognizing the role of an affective community, within which our feelings
and thoughts originate, can we comprehend how a memory is at once
reorganized and reconstructed, and that the past is revealed more fully when
we remember together.

By showing how a remembrance is at once reorganized and reconstructed,
Halbwachs aimed to prove that it is an illusion that our memories are
independent. This illusion, he maintains, is the outcome of the interweaving
of several series of collective thoughts, which make most social influences
unperceivable. People usually believe that they are free in their thoughts and
feelings, when in fact they draw on the same part of common thinking and
understanding (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 45). Only in social contexts are
individuals capable of transforming their private images into appropriate
patterns which are kept by the entire group. These conceptual structures are
determined by communities in the process of remembering, which starts
from shared data or conceptions. By showing that different social groups,
such as the family, the religious community or the social class, have different
memories attached to their respective mental landmarks, Halbwachs asserts
that an individual memory separated from collective memory is provisional
and without meaning. Although we are ‘participants in the events’ as indi-
viduals, our memories remain collective because we always think as mem-
bers of the group to which we belong, because our ideas originated within it
and because our thinking keeps us in contact with that group (Halbwachs

54 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

[1926] 1950: 23). However, we do not need the actual presence of others to
preserve our memories:

In fact I continue to be subject to the influence of a society even
when I have walked away from it: it is enough that I carry within
me, in my spirit, all that allows me to classify myself with
reference to its members, to reimmerse myself in their milieu and
their own particular time, and feel myself very much a part of the
group.

(Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 128)

Halbwachs’ rejection of the individualist perspective and his idea of col-
lective memory as the conceptual schemes or ‘social frameworks’ in which
individual memories come to be located and which provide the model which
constrains individual memory show him as a faithful follower of Durkheim.
Halbwachs is, however, a more conciliatory figure than Durkheim (Coser
1992: 4) and tries to introduce psychology into sociological enterprise.
While Durkheim neglects the issue of individual consciousness, Halbwachs
asserts that it is an individual who remembers, although this individual,
being located in a specific group context, draws on this social context to
remember or recreate the past. Yet, his interest in psychological explanations
is rather limited as he quickly moves on to say that people remember only as
members of social groups and thus collective memory is different from both
the historical and the autobiographical forms. Furthermore, even though
Halbwachs admits that only individual recollection exists, he nevertheless
argues that our individual memories, if not located within conceptual struc-
tures that are defined by communities at large, tend to fade away, are less
accessible and more difficult to recall because they do not enjoy group sup-
port. In contrast, the collective memory lasts longer since it draws strength
‘from its base in a coherent body of people’ ([1926] 1950: 48).

Halbwachs left us with a rather unclear legacy. He never really elaborated
the theoretical foundation of the concept of collective memory and did not
provide a clear definition of the notion. His idea of collective memory is
often criticized for its inconcreteness and lack of clarity (Gedi and Elam
1996). It is even described as a confusing or ‘woolly’ concept which lacks
any explanatory power (Osiel 1997: 18) or as coming close to ‘the bad old
Romantic notion of the spirit’ or the ‘inner’ character of race or nation
(Klein 2000: 9). While Halbwachs was right to say that social groups con-
struct their own images of the world by establishing an agreed version of the
past, he failed to explain how the dynamics of collective memory work. His
effort to combine personal images and social manifestations of ideas has not
resulted in a clear theory capable of explaining the way collective memory
is formed. Halbwachs’ belief in the power of society to shape individual
memory neglects the dialectical tensions between personal memory and the
social construction of the past. His social determinism is responsible for his

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 55

failure to address the question of how individual consciousnesses might
relate to those of the collectivities these individuals actually make up. By
moving from the psychological unconscious to social thought without giving
an adequate account of the place the individual memory occupies within
the collective memory, Halbwachs was unable to explain the fact of the
social persistence of images of the past (Connerton 1989: 38). Generally,
Halbwachs puts too much emphasis on the collective nature of social con-
sciousness and disconnects it from the actual thought process of any particu-
lar individual. Indeed, Fentress and Wickham argue that Halbwachs’ vision
of individuals comes too close to seeing them as ‘a sort of automaton,
passively obeying the interiorised collective will’ (1992: x).

The explanatory power of Halbwachs’ approach is further reduced by
another essential element - namely his assumption that collective identity
precedes memory (Megill 1999: 44). The assertion that identity is already
well established, combined with the assumption that social identity is stable,
makes Halbwachs’ main argument (that social identity determines the con-
tent of collective memories), much less interesting. Due to the assumption
that memory is determined by an already well established identity, his
theory also undervalues other functions of collective memory. It seems that
Halbwachs underestimates the importance of groups’ living memories,
because instead of seeing these memories in dialogue, interdependence
and conflict with the tradition of the main collectivity, he views them as
integrated into the tradition of the most powerful group. Thus, his con-
ceptualization of the relations between past and present is rather one-
dimensional and assumes the stability of the vision of the past in a group
memory. Such an assertion not only prevents us from accounting for
changes in a group’s perception of the past, which could arise due to new
conditions, but also presumes a vision of frozen social identity.

Halbwachs argues that memories are bound together and sustained due to
the fact that they form part of a whole aggregate of thoughts and interests
common to a group. Thus, complexity and coherence in public memory tend
to correspond to complexity and coherence at the social level (Douglas
1986: 80). Because of his insistence on the way in which collective memory
is continually revised to sustain solidarity, Halbwachs’ approach is adopted
by many studies of the invention of traditions. However, despite the fact that
his work has inspired many such investigations, Halbwachs’ position cannot
be reduced to the narrow presentist approach. Because Halbwachs’ pre-
occupation with the role of collective memory in securing stability, solidarity
and continuity goes together with his insistence on the centrality of change
and variation in societies, it can be said that his perspective does not exclude
the possibility of collective memory having both cumulative and presentist
aspects. Thus, Halbwachs’ viewing of collective memory as simultaneously
plural and changeable as well as a storage system for the social order and
stability (Douglas 1986: 70) makes his ideas popular among both

56 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

researchers interested in stability and order, and among writers who define
collective memories as effective markers of social differentiation.

The presentist memory approach: the invention
of traditions

This part of the chapter examines the presentist approach to social remem-
bering as exemplified in works on the invention of public rituals as modes of
social control. This perspective scrutinizes how public notions of history are
manipulated by the dominant sectors of society through public commemor-
ations, education systems, mass media, and official records and chronolo-
gies. The ‘invention of tradition perspective’ or ‘theory of the politics of
memory’, as the presentist memory approach is also called, argues that the
past is moulded to suit present dominant interests. Researchers working
within this paradigm have illustrated how new traditions and rituals are
‘invented’ in the sense of being deliberately designed and produced with a
view to creating new political realities, defining nations and sustaining
national communities. Defining social memories as inventions of the past,
they study the institutionalization of ‘remembrance’ within national ritual
and educational systems. Such investigations show how nationalist move-
ments create a master commemorative narrative that highlights their mem-
bers’ common past and legitimizes their aspiration for a shared destiny.
While Hobsbawm and Ranger’s Invention of Tradition (1983) still remains
the main work written in this perspective, there are now many studies
concerned with the role played in modern societies by constructed versions
of the past in establishing social cohesion, legitimizing authority and
socializing populations in a common culture.

While the Durkheimian tradition argues that we remember collectively
and selectively, the invention of tradition approach suggests more directly
who is responsible for memory’s selectiveness and points to causes of this
selectiveness. In other words, investigators working from this perspective
show who controls or imposes the content of social memories, and that
those ‘invented’ memories serve the current purposes of those in power. The
official management of collective memory, while always designed to legitim-
ize power, is seen as revolving essentially around the two poles of censorship
and celebration, or socially organized forgetting and socially organized
remembering. Both methods are frequently employed in the deliberate pro-
duction of traditions serving states to legitimize and stabilize their political
orders. However, it is the nature of the political regime that determines
which methods are emphasized and relied upon to construct a ‘useable past’.
In this state-centred approach, the emphasis is on the mechanism of state
rituals as the means of the production of official memory.

Analysing the role of these dominant narratives or official ideologies in

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 57

establishing national cohesion, Hobsbawm and Ranger in The Invention of
Tradition stress the primary role of the state in shaping collective memory.

While examining the late nineteenth-century European states and the
widespread progress of electoral democracy, they argue that the decline of
traditional political structures led to invented traditions. The emergence of
mass politics demanded the construction of traditions that could symbolize
societal cohesion, legitimize new institutions, statuses and relations of
authority, and inculcate new beliefs and values. Hobsbawm and Ranger
define the notion of ‘invented tradition’ in a broad sense as contrived rather
than growing up spontaneously. The term ‘tradition’ here means ‘a set of
practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a
ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms
of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the
past’ (Hobsbawm 1983: 1).

Hobsbawn points out that many traditions which appear to be old are
actually products, at most, of the past couple of centuries, and often only of
several decades. Invented traditions tend to establish themselves relatively
quickly and aim to imply a long-term continuity, as in the case of the kilt, the
common symbol of Scottishness, which was invented by an English indus-
trialist in the early eighteenth century. Invented traditions are not, therefore,
genuine. In this respect they differ from customs, which dominated so-called
traditional societies, and whose function was technical rather than ideo-
logical. Where ‘the old ways are alive’, traditions need be neither revived nor
invented; however, where there is a need to provide a framework for action
that can go largely unquestioned, and a justification of power, traditions are
constructed (Hobsbawm 1983: 8). According to Hobsbawm and Ranger
(1983), invented traditions are used as a means of exercising power, to estab-
lish or legitimize institutions, to symbolize social cohesion and to socialize
individuals to the existing order.

The period 1870-1914 in Europe was unique in terms of a mass-
production of traditions because there was an enormous need to understand
and reflect on the rapid social transformations of the period: ‘Quite new, or
old but dramatically transformed, social groups, environments and social
contexts called for new devices to ensure or express social cohesion and
identity and to structure social relations’ (Hobsbawm 1983: 262). Dramatic
social changes such as industrialization, and the process of democratization,
along with the expansion of the mass electorate, made the old rulings by the
state inpractical and dramatized the problem of maintaining public loyalty.
As the masses could not be relied upon to follow their masters, there was a
need for new methods of establishing bonds of loyalty. With the emergence
of electoral politics, the late nineteenth-century nation states tried to secure
mass obedience with the help of new symbols, such as flags, national
anthems, military uniforms and new celebrations and rituals. For example,
in Britain, this period witnessed the revival of royal ritualism, which was

58 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

seen as a necessary counterweight to the dangers of popular democracy. In
new countries, where rulers were unable to reconstruct or reach back,
nationalism invented the national self-consciousness. Among the main
Western European states, only Italy had to start the process of national
justification through the construction of traditions totally from scratch.
Here Hobsbawm (1983: 267) quotes the writer and politician d’Azeglio’s
famous phrase, ‘We have made Italy: now we must make Italians’. The
implementation of new traditions was ensured through three different
methods and institutions: the development of education, the invention of
public ceremonies and the mass production of public monuments.

From the 1870s, with the notion that ‘authority once achieved must have
a secure and usable past’ (Plumb 1969: 41), the British undertook a series of
attempts to re-establish political order in their colonies through the con-
struction of new traditions. In India (Cohen 1983) and in Africa (Ranger
1983), the British experimented with varying forms of ritual to mark public
occasions and justify their role. In both cases, the most far reaching inven-
tions of tradition took place when the British believed themselves to be
respecting age-old local customs. So, for example, before 1860 both Indian
and British soldiers wore western-style uniforms, but the Indian uniform
was then modified to include turbans, sashes and tunics, because they were
seen by the British as more ‘authentic’ (Cohen 1983: 167-90). After India’s
independence, many traditions invented by the British were rejected. With a
new balance of power, India adopted new codes of conduct, as illustrated by
Gandhi’s new standards of dress: ‘No longer were Indians to wear either
western clothes or the “native” costumes decreed by their imperial rulers,
but home-spun simple peasant dress’ (Cohen 1983: 209).

In colonial Africa, ‘what were called customary law, customary land-
rights, customary political structure and so on, were in fact all invented by
colonial codification’ (Ranger 1983: 250). Here, white settlers constructed
traditions both to define and justify their role as undisputed masters, and
these invented practices were not counterbalanced by local cultures or social
forces. In contrast with Europe, the majority of invented traditions ‘became
much more starkly a matter of command and control’ (Ranger 1983: 211).
Even more importantly, in Europe ‘these invented traditions of the new
ruling classes were to some extent balanced by the invented traditions of
industrial workers or by the invented “folk” cultures of peasants’. Unlike in
Africa, in Europe the traditions of non-ruling classes were also important.
One of these traditions was the working-class tradition, which, with May
Day celebrations and other new labour rituals, was halfway between ‘polit-
ical’ and ‘social’ traditions, ‘belonging to the first through their association
with mass organizations and parties which could and indeed aimed to
become regimes and states, to the second because they genuinely expressed
the workers’ consciousness’ (Hobsbawm 1983: 286). These half-invented
traditions were developed by social movements through the cultivation of a

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 59

common dress code and common activities, such as in the case of the
working class, football matches (Hobsbawm 1983: 293).

The performative nature of traditions, articulated somewhere between
public and private representations, allows us to see how public representa-
tions join private ones. Examinations of various people’s and groups’ tradi-
tions provide insights into their relations to the past, and throw light on
what is actually being preserved in the popular memory of the past and what
was officially invented. The official management of the past through the
invention of tradition aimed at concealing the balance of power and wealth
was designed to reflect the dramatic changes of the period in such a way as
to ensure the continuity of mass loyalty. The erection of new monuments,
the invention of new symbols and the rewriting of history books can be seen
as the state’s responses to the insecurities of electoral politics.

The invention of tradition theory is applied by Hobsbawm and Ranger
(1983) to explain changes in the nature of the state brought about by the
emergence of mass politics. A question arises as to whether this theory’s
explanatory power is equally impressive in relation to other periods or other
types of regime. In other words, in what kind of political cultures does the
application of tradition theory tell us something interesting about social
reality? Unfortunately, the application of this perspective to modern western
societies has become ‘somewhat predictable’ and repetitive (Confino 1997:
1387). It suggests that the invention of tradition approach’s relevance to
open and democratic systems is questionable. Yet, an examination of public
memories of the Nazis in postwar divided Germany shows that the presen-
tist perspective still preserves some explanatory power in reference to
undemocratic systems, which not only construct and control memory from
above but also eliminate any potential challenges threatening the official
version of the past. The comparison of West Germany’s and East Germany’s
official ways of representing their Nazi past reveals not only how different
political systems manipulate public memory but also variations in regimes’
abilities to ‘freeze’ official memory. In both countries in the first 20 years
after World War II public memories of the Nazis were constructed and
implemented to justify the respective nations’ political order. East Germany
developed its own vision of the Nazi past, which marginalized the Jewish
suffering and glorified the contribution of anti-fascists and communist
resistance movements. West Germany’s memory not only included the suf-
fering of different groups (for example, German soldiers) and emphasized
the courage of different groups (the upper class and Christian opponents of
the Nazis), but was also marked by a recognition of Jewish suffering (as
illustrated by the agreement to pay financial restitution to Jewish survivors),
on the one hand, and by an unwillingness to confront the Nazi past, on the
other (Herf 1997). However, in West Germany, in contrast to East Germany,
the problem of coming to terms with the past became a focal point for public
and highly controversial discussions. These debates, including voices calling

60 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

for Germans to stop avoiding a confrontation with their Nazi past, as well as
attempts to rewrite the past, started in the 1960s and accelerated from the
mid-1980s onwards, with a series of public exchanges between prominent
German scholars arguing for and against ‘normalizing’ the Nazi past (see
Chapter 6). In contrast, in East Germany, as in all non-democratic systems
where there is no counterbalance to state-party power and therefore no
alternative versions of the past, the official memory remained stable and
unchallenged. It seems, therefore, that the invention of tradition perspective
preserves some relevance in reference to undemocratic systems, which tend
to freeze memories and do not permit pluralistic debates.

It is an open question as to what degree the processes of the invention of
the national consciousness and the organizing of forgetting imply nothing
more than fabrication and falsity rather than ‘imagining’ and creation.
Benedict Anderson (1983: 15), when discussing Gellner’s (1965) observa-
tion that nationalism invented the nation, points out that Gellner equates
‘invention’ with fabrication. In other words, Gellner implies that somewhere
‘true’ communities exist but that some pasts are ‘invented’. The invention of
tradition theory likewise assumes that modern societies’ traditions are quite
recent in origin, which suggests that older traditions are the ‘real’ ones. For
Anderson, all communities are imagined, and therefore they cannot be dis-
tinguished by ‘their falsity/genuiness’. However, for many historians, not
only for those aiming to describe the past as it ‘actually had been’, this
equation presents a problem, since when talking about invention (e.g. the
invention of Scotland) we overlook the problem of whether ‘people [arej
free to invent, any nation, any group, what they want? Are there no con-
straints?’ (Burke 1998: 202). The presentist approach fails to acknowledge
that the past endures in the present not only through self-conscious com-
memoration rituals ‘but through psychological, social, linguistic and polit-
ical processes that keep the past alive without necessarily intending to do so’
(Schudson 1997: 3).

Moreover, it is not always possible, particularly in democratic countries,
to impose on people totally invented or fabricated traditions. As numerous
examples from many countries show, people tend to reject any vision of the
past which contradicts their recollection and sense of truth. Some past
events can be of such importance to people that they feel compelled to tell
their stories, therefore a collective memory is not so easy to undermine or
totally distort (Schudson 1997: 5). Even more importantly, if a central
power denies the reality of any groups’ memory and experience, it often
discredits itself (Osiel 1997: 113). The invention of tradition approach also
avoids the very interesting question of why some traditions but not others
become popular and enjoy social support. What is remarkable about tradi-
tions is not that they are invented, as almost all of them, at least to some
degree, are, but why so many of them work and are accepted as ‘real’.

By treating memory and commemoration as sources of support for the

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 61

exercise of power and authority, and instruments of elite manipulation used
to control lower-class and minority groups, the invention of tradition per-
spective tends to reduce the concept of collective memory to the notion of
ideology or ‘false consciousness’. It further assumes that ideology is in
opposition to the ‘truth’ (Layder 1994: 105). Consequently, while its social
and cultural aspects are underplayed, memory ‘becomes a prisoner of polit-
ical reductionism and functionalism’ (Confino 1997: 1395). The equation of
ideology with memory is also misleading because the main function of
ideology is to ensure cohesion, while collective memory can be both of the
divisive and the solidifying kind. Even more importantly, the fact that the
past is transmitted through lines of authority does not necessarily mean that
all public commemorations are intended to include ‘false consciousness’
(Schwartz 2000: 16). The memory of a social group cannot always be
reduced to the political aim of sustaining relations of power as it is not
necessarily solely imposed from above. In this sense memory differs from
custom, which dominates so-called traditional societies.

The growing recognition of the weaknesses of this approach is, however,
accompanied by an increased comprehension that the essence of tradition is
always to confer the legitimacy of continuity on what is in practice always
changing; that there is no such thing as a completely pure tradition; that the
appeal to the past has always been selective and often part of demagogy, and
therefore traditions always incorporate power, whether they are constructed
in deliberate ways or not (Luke 1996; Collini 1999; Giddens 1999). Such
a new understanding led to the development of a more moderate version of
the presentist approach. This modified restatement of the dominant ideology
thesis, moreover, has further enhanced our understanding of how we
remember.

The popular memory approach: confronting the
dominant ideology

Like the previous approach, the popular memory perspective assumes that
our recollection of the past is instrumental, influenced by present interests,
and that the politics of memory is conflictual. However, in contrast to the
previous theory, this approach is less deterministic and allows some space
for other solutions to the conflict over memory than just its manipulation
and control from above. In other words, unlike the presentist perspective,
which assumes that conflict is the natural state of society and that memories
are socially ‘constituted’ from above, the popular memory theory points to
the possibility of the construction of memory from the ‘bottom up’, as it
appreciates a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local
and the particular and then builds outwards toward a total story.

In contrast to the invention of tradition approach, which argues that

62 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

memory is imposed on a public that has no agency, this perspective assumes
that groups (in some circumstances) are capable of asserting their own ver-
sion of the past. The writers interested in the popular memory approach
analyse the connection between the hegemonic order and local groups’
memories and classify these particular rememberings as ‘public memory’,
‘counter -memory’, ‘oppositional memory’ or ‘unofficial memory’. Although
these researchers stress that the dominant vision of the past is linked to the
techniques and practices of power, they tend to investigate a much richer
spectrum of representations of the past than the invention of tradition
approach. This type of memory studies took its earlier inspiration from
Foucault’s concepts of popular memory and counter-memory and later from
the works of the British cultural studies theorists.

Even though the notion of popular memory does not play any essential
role in Foucault’s writing, it has been a significant step in the development of
memory studies. His conceptualization of memory as discursive practice
provides memory with ‘discursive materiality’ and therefore allows for its
investigation ‘in the different discursive formations’ (Foucault 1978: 15).
Such a definition of memory, together with Foucault’s argument about the
power and knowledge relationship, was intended to shed light on the pro-
cess that determines which voices are heard in the public forum. Foucault
views popular memory as ‘actually a very important factor in struggle’
because ‘if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamics’
(Pearson 1999: 179). When people’s memory is programmed and con-
trolled, according to Foucault, we deal with ‘popular memory’ which is
subordinated in its relations to the dominant ideologies and which therefore
reproduces the established consensual view of the past.

According to Foucault, ‘popular memory’ is a form of collective know-
ledge possessed by people who are ‘barred from writing, from producing
their books themselves, from drawing up their own historical accounts -
these people nevertheless do have a way of recording history, of remember-
ing or of keeping it fresh and using it’ (Pearson 1999: 179). The ‘popular
memory’, seen in opposition to the dominant memory, is a political force of
people marginalized by universal discourses, whose knowledges have been
disqualified as inadequate to their task, located low down in the hierarchy.
Since power relations always involve the possibility of resistance, Foucault
assumes a connection between memory and popular resistance, particularly
in the nineteenth century, where ‘there was a whole tradition of struggles
which were transmitted orally, or in writing or in songs, etc.’ (Pearson 1999:
179).

Although Foucault argues that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’,
his assertion that power plays the dominant role in the construction of
memories seems to weaken this claim and leads him to a pessimistic conclu-
sion that people are unable to liberate themselves from oppressive power
(Baert 1998: 131). Consequently, despite his attention to otherness, and

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 63

despite his pointing to the importance of links between memory and polit-
ical struggle, Foucault undervalues the ability of popular memories to resist
dominant control. His lack of interest in human agents and the fact that he
delocalizes discourses results in his failure to analyse the actual con-
sequences of popular memories (Friedland and Boden 1994: 25-7). Many
writers have criticized Foucault’s inability to account for the dialectic
relationships between the popular memory and the dominant discourse
(Bommes and Wright 1982; Harper 1997; Pearson 1999; Weissberg 1999).
Foucault’s notion of popular memory is blamed for assuming that popular
memory is a ‘wholly unified’ and coherent construction as if it was entirely
‘laid from above’ (Bommes and Wright 1982: 256). Pearson (1999) rejects
Foucault’s assumption that mass media reprogrammes memory by repre-
senting the values of the dominant social formations. Harper (1997: 164)
calls for a more historically and socially rooted analysis of collective mem-
ory because ‘a fuzzy concept’ of popular memory has become ‘far too
attached to a particular orthodoxy, which is usually fuelled by a sense of
political disappointment’. This criticism translates itself into studies which
attempt to analyse the content and precise location of alternative memories
that exist beneath the dominant discourse, or into studies which illuminate
the complexity of the connection between the hegemonic order and histor-
ical representations.

The first type of investigation has been developed since the early 1980s
by the Popular Memory Group at the Centre for Contemporary Studies in
Birmingham, while the second type often invokes Foucault’s (1977) notion
of counter-memory. The Popular Memory Group’s studies have emerged as
a result of the growing criticism of the presentist approach and as an
attempt to further enhance the appeal of the popular memory approach.
Research initiated by the Group adopted theories about narratives from
literary criticism and its members, many of whom were particularly inter-
ested in the British memory of World War II, studied various forms in
which people articulate their memories. The Popular Memory Group com-
bined its criticism of oral historians’ failure to account for many layers of
individual memory and the plurality of versions of the past with its
re-evaluation of Foucault’s notion of popular memory. In its major book,
Making Histories (1982), the Group outlined its position on the signifi-
cance of the past and expressed its interest in the investigation of the
construction of public histories and the interaction between private and
public senses of the past.

The Popular Memory Group provided further negative reviews of the
presentist approach as its members were critical of the invented tradition
argument that memory is created solely from the ‘top down’. The Group did
not conceive of a dominant political order as monolithic, singular or total-
izing, but rather as a dynamic, conflictual, fluid and unstable ‘site of contest-
ation between the dominant social formations in the ruling power bloc and

64 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

those marginalized social formations seeking concessions from the domin-
ant, and whom the dominant constantly strives to incorporate’ (Pearson
1999: 180). The Group, in contrast to Foucault, stressed more directly and
more consequently the dialectical interaction between ‘popular’ and ‘hege-
monic’ discourses and between private memory and public memory. The
interaction between these aspects of memory, understood as a hegemonic
process of ideological domination and resistance, shapes the content of dom-
inant memory. Popular memory is conceived here as a site of struggle
between different voices seeking to construct versions of the past, while its
connection with dominant institutions ensures its pervasiveness and domin-
ation in the public sphere.

The Popular Memory Group defined popular memory as a ‘dimension of
political practice’ and saw it as a composite construct of various traces,
influences and layers. Thus, its aim was to consider all the ways in which a
sense of the past is produced: through public representations and through
private memory (Popular Memory Group 1982: 205, 207). Although when
referring to the representations which affect individual or group conceptions
of the past, members of the Popular Memory Group speak about ‘dominant
memory’, they do not mean to imply ‘that conceptions of the past that
acquire a dominance in the field of public representations are either mono-
lithically installed or everywhere believed’ (p. 207). The Group assumes that
dominant memory is open to contestation, although they insist that we
should not overlook the fact that there are ‘real processes of domination in
the historical field’ which result in some memories being marginalized or
excluded, while others, especially those which conform to the ‘fattened
stereotypes of myth’ are successful (p. 208). Among institutions influencing
the public construction of the popular memory, the state and various
cultural and educational institutions are seen as the most influential.

The study initiated by the Popular Memory Group focused on the relation
between dominant memory and oppositional forms across the whole public
field and on ‘the more privatized sense of the past which is generated within
a lived culture’ (1982: 211).

The international impact of the Group can be illustrated by such studies as
Luisa Passerini’s (1987) Fascism in Popular Memory, which analyses the
cultural memory of the Turin working class, and Alistair Thomson’s (1994)
Anzac Memories: Living ivitb the Legend, which explores the power of
Australian legends in shaping individual memory and illustrates the complex
entanglement of national and private memory. Such investigations are in
many respects similar to research that invokes Foucault’s (1977) notion of
counter-memory.

The Foucault-inspired counter-memory strand offers an important cri-
tique of dominant ideology as it contains a suspicion of totalizing public
narratives. The idea of counter-memory illuminates the connection between
the hegemonic order and historical representations because it allows us to

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 65

overcome the presentist approach’s failure to differentiate between the
‘truth’ and ideology, and provides the possibility of accounting for sub-
ordinated voices from the past. Bouchard, in his introduction to Foucault’s
book Language, Counter-memory, Practice, refers to counter-memory as
‘other voices which have remained silent for so long’ (1977: 18). In
Foucault’s view the recovery of these other voices and traditions allows us to
make visible the relationship of domination which ‘is fixed, through its his-
tory, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations.
It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even
within bodies’ (Foucault 1977: 150). Through counter-memory, we ‘dis-
invest ourselves from the power that a particular constellation of meanings
once held over us’ (Clifford 2001: 133). According to Foucault, counter-
memory ‘must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous
finality’ (1977: 144). It also has to ‘cultivate the details and accidents that
accompany every beginning’ and it ought to describe ‘the endlessly repeated
play of dominations’ (Foucault 1977: 150).

Researchers interested in counter-memories have found Foucault’s
general theory, and especially his interest in the plurality of forces, practices
and regimes that exist within a society, as well as his assertion that all dis-
courses are merely partial claims to truth, very attractive and well-suited to
their objective of showing that power bends discourses to its needs and so
revises our conception of the past. Foucault’s shift of the focus from memory
to counter-memory appeals to many contemporary historians interested in
studying how commemoration and tradition serve political purposes: ‘It was
Foucault who showed historians the way in which discourse receives its
shape and how in turn that shape frames our understanding of the past’
(Hutton 1993: 123). Foucault’s approach ‘undermines the apparent coher-
ence of present belief or normative system’ (Baert 1998: 127) by confronting
the present with the past, by demonstrating how new meanings coexist with
old ones and by showing the mutlilayered nature of reality where the present
and old belief systems create ‘an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures
and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or
from underneath’ (Foucault 1977: 146). The discourse against power is ‘the
counter-discourse which ultimately matters’ (Foucault 1977: 209) because it
can confiscate, at least temporarily, power to speak on the specific issues.
With the struggle against power aiming ‘at revolving and undermining
power where it is most invisible and insidious’ (1977: 208), the discourse of
struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive, hidden,
repressed and unsaid.

Counter-memories, as discursive practices through which memories are
continuously revised, illuminate the issue of the discontinuity of intellectual
tradition as well as ‘the process of differentiating ideas . . . integral to the
production of discourse’ (Hutton 1993: 114). Being the alternative narrative
which challenges the dominant discourse, counter -memory has direct

66 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

political implications. By challenging the hegemony of the political elite’s
construction of the past, counter-memory turns memory into a ‘contested
territory in which groups engaging in a political conflict promote competi-
tive views of the past in order to gain control over the political center or to
legitimize a separatist orientation’ (Zerubavel 1997: 11). As the examples
of the French and the Russian Revolutions demonstrate, where previous
counter-memories became official memories used to support the new
governments’ order, counter-memory can be transformed, as it increases its
popularity, into a dominant discourse.

Studies of counter-memories illustrate that collective memory constructed
from the bottom up can exist in different relations to the dominant/official
representation of the past, ranging from sharp contrast to close similarity.
According to investigations of many different cases of oppositional memory
quoted in the literature, from memories of minority nationalities, through
memories of various social classes, we learn that memories of the same event
can be formulated very differently by various groups, that images of past
events and their participants change as time passes, that political actors
replace one another and that political activism and its accompanying
tensions stimulate interest in the past (Szacka 1997). An examination of
various class-based memories suggests their importance as a source of class
identity. For example, several studies demonstrate the use of imagery of
resistance against the state as a representation of peasant collective identity
(Connerton 1989; Fentress and Wickham 1992). Similar conclusions have
been reached about working-class memories which include, along with
recollections of the resistance to the state and employers, memories of the
antagonistic relations between groups and categories, and of divisions
within the labour movement (Samuel 1981; Bauman 1982). Workers’
memory reveals their capacity for independent thinking and self-reliance as
well as an independence from the influence of organizational leaders, and
thus destroys ‘mythologies about the role of organizations as all-powerful
machines manipulating the passive masses’ (Debouzy 1986: 276).

More recent studies of both popular and counter -memory have prepared
the ground for the development of a more moderate version of the dominant
ideology approach to studying memory. These new works (e.g. Bodnar
1992), assume that public memory can be simultaneously multivocal and
hegemonic. Public memory is seen as being a form of ideological system, the
function of which is to mediate the competing interests and competing
meanings of the past and the present. So, it is concluded that even though
public memory is not simply class or status politics, it is often distorted in a
way which, in the final instance, reflects the main power relations. While it
is true that memory’s distortions take place not through simple coercion
but through a more subtle process of communication, the point is that
‘the sources of cultural and political power are not simply diffuse’ (Bodnar
1992: 19).

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 67

However, even this moderate version of the dominant ideology has not
avoided voices of criticism pointing to several weaknesses in this approach.
First, critics suggest that the popular memory approach still conceptualizes
the past as ‘a political fact, made and remade in the service of new power
arrangements’ (Schwartz 2000: 16). Second, it is pointed out that historical
facts do not support many conclusions formulated by this type of research.
For example, Schwartz (2000) notes, while referring to Bodnar’s (1992)
investigation, that it was not the official national elite that taught various
majority groups patriotism and used their wealth and privileges to make
heroes in their own image, as the popular memory approach claims, but that
those groups’ patriotism was often a result of their own ethnic and religious
leaders’ efforts and visions. Furthermore, the popular memory approach not
only avoids the reductionism and the predictability of the presentist perspec-
tive, but also fails to explain why some symbols, events and heroes, but not
others, are incorporated into public memory. Finally, it does not have any-
thing to say about cases where popular memory invokes not manipulated
and conflictual sentiments but rather shared symbols. Since the popular
memory perspective assumes that conflict is the natural state of society, it
dismisses the possibility that the politics of memory can be consensual and
conflictual. It is therefore unable to explain how it happened that, for
example, some memories constituted common models for acting for the
whole nation and as such ‘embodied a universal cultural presence’ (Schwartz
2000:255).

In the light of the growing recognition of the assumption that the content
of memory cannot be seen as only manipulated, and that official recollection
and social experience are vital elements of memory, the popular memory
approach has been modified. The acceptance that memory is always partly a
‘given’, that it is never purely a construction and that every community
should be seen as partly a ‘community of fate’ and partly a ‘community of
will’ (Booth 1999) are the starting points of the dynamics of memory
approach, which will be our next subject of investigation.

The dynamics of memory approach: memory as a
process of negotiation

In this section we examine theories of remembering that focus on the active
production and mediation of temporal meanings of the past. In contrast to
presentist theories, which show who controls or invents the content of social
memories, the dynamics of memory perspective views collective memory as
an ongoing process of negotiation and illustrates ‘limits to the power of
actors in the present to remake the past according to their own interests’
(Schudson 1997: 4). While the invention of tradition approach argues that
memory is constructed from above and does not conceptualize groups as

68 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

active agents continuously attempting to assert their own version of
the past, this alternative theory points to the possibility of the construction
of memory from the ‘bottom up’ and argues that the past is neither a subject-
ive nor a linguistic fabrication. It also assumes that people keep the past alive
for not necessarily instrumental reasons as their memories reflect a respect-
ive group’s not always coherent system of values and views. Arguing that
distortion of memory can occur for various reasons and arguing against
ascribing manipulative motives in advance, this approach questions the
assertion that the maintenance of hegemonic control by dominant social
groups is the sole factor responsible for memory content. Without denying
instances of memory distortion caused by its manipulation by political elites,
the dynamics of memory perspective nevertheless points out that in some
cases (e.g. in post-colonial situations where the creation of national identity
is necessary for functional reasons of political and cultural cohesion) ‘the
willful alternation of collective memory becomes a necessity for a valuable,
progressive society’ (Kammen 1995b: 340).

The dynamic perspective’s definition of memory does not reduce remem-
bering to an instrument of elite manipulation used to control the lower
classes and minority groups. It locates memory in ‘the space between an
imposed ideology and the possibility of an alternative way of understanding
experience’ (Radstone 2000: 18). By not viewing memory as a hostage to
political conditions of the present, this approach allows some space for
progressive challenges to the status quo. At the heart of this broad dynamic
of memory approach lies a belief in the relationship between remembering
and transformation. Investigators of alternative memories, especially trau-
matic memories, do so not only to honour history’s victims but in the hope
that memory can prevent repetition of tragic events. In other words, in
contrast to the invention of tradition approach, which views memory as
a social group’s experience that essentially sustains relations of power,
the dynamics of memory perspective argues that memory is not solely
constrained by the official narrative. It assumes a more ‘complex view of
relation between past and present in shaping collective memory’, and sees
collective memory as ‘an active process of sense making through time’ (Olick
and Levy 1997: 922).

The dynamics of memory approach argues that ‘the past is highly resistant
to efforts to make it over’ (Schudson 1989: 105). According to this per-
spective, although it cannot be denied that many groups use the past for
instrumental reasons, nor that we should be grateful for all works done by
‘interest theory’, nonetheless, such a vision denies the past as purely a con-
struction and insists that it has an inherent continuity. Not only do groups
not have equal access to the materials available for the construction of the
past, but the available materials are far from infinite. As Schudson (1989)
argues, conflicts about the past among a variety of groups further limit our
freedom to reconstruct the past according to our own interests. Finally,

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 69

taking into account that groups can choose only from the available past and
that the available past is limited, it can be asked: are they free to choose as
they want? According to Schudson (1989: 109), they are not: ‘Far from it.
There are a variety of ways in which the freedom to choose is constrained’.
Among the many factors constraining people’s choices are traumatic events
that make ‘the past part of us’ as their impact and importance commit us to
remember them.

The dynamics of memory approach also tries to correct the Durkheimian
insistence on the persistence of what is remembered by pointing to ‘the fact
that permanent and changing visions of the past are part of one another’
(Schwartz 2000: 302). Likewise, this approach differs from Halbwachs’ per-
spective because it argues for the need to historicize identities and meaning
systems and tries to comprehend not only how people use the past but also
how the past endures in the present. Although the dynamics of memory
approach argues along the collective memory approach’s line that collective
memory is a record of resemblance, it does not assume that the group
remains the same, and therefore can accommodate changes in the group’s
memory and account for its incoherence. Halbwachs, on the other hand,
asserts the stability of a social group’s memory because he assumes that the
group’s identity, which determines the content of collective memory, is
stable and hitherto well established. In contrast, the dynamics of memory
approach recognizes the temporal dimension of identities and argues for the
need to analyse them in terms of constitutive and transforming moments.
Seeing collective identities as historically constructed enables this perspec-
tive to account for changes in groups’ identities and their aspirations for
themselves and others. In other words, memory, as conceptualized by the
dynamics of memory approach, is never solely manipulated or durable;
instead, the role of agency and the temporal dimension of memory as well as
the historicity of social identities are stressed and analysed.

While both the invention of tradition and the Halbwachs approach
emphasize the impact of the present upon the past, they do not attempt to
explain the use of historical knowledge in interpreting the present and
do not see that the past endures in the present in ways other than invented
acts of commemoration. In contrast, the dynamics of memory approach is
interested in non-commemorative memory, which is distinct from recollec-
tion. Although commemoration and recollection are often intertwined, they
nonetheless direct research attention to opposite areas: the recollection
orientation aims to develop an interest in narrative representation of the
past, and the commemoration orientation enhances an interest in performa-
tivity, which further focuses attention on habits and therefore on ‘bodily
automatisms’ (Connerton 1989: 5). Until recently, the majority of studies of
collective memory have focused on the activity of commemoration as serv-
ing ‘the need of a community to resist change in its self-conceptions’ (Hutton
1988: 315). Connerton’s conceptualization of political commemorative

70 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

rituals, which adopts Durkheim’s idea of social memory as standing ‘at the
heart of a society’s system of rituals’ (Pickering 1998: 9), explains how social
memory is transferred through commemorative ceremonies and bodily
practice (see Chapter 4).

In contrast to investigations of commemorative practices and rituals,
which emphasize studying those acts of transfer that make remembering
in common possible, the investigations of recollection are interested in
narrative reports of the past.

The new approach is less interested in commemorative practices as stabil-
izing memory and reproducing the group’s cohesion; rather it focuses on
activities of recollection as ‘the act of establishing a relationship with some
event issue, or entity of the past’ (Zelizer 1995: 217). Narratization, which
refers to both telling a story about the past and telling a story about the
past’s relations to the present, is an effort to comprehend and interpret while
making a story intelligible and interesting (Schudson 1995: 357). The recol-
lection of the past, from this perspective, focuses on the central products of
narrative activity - namely on the construction of a narrative identity, both
at the level of history (e.g. identity as a nation) and at the level of the
individual (Wood 1991: 4). This makes identity less stable, as many stories
can be woven from the same material, and it defines remembering as a
processual action by which ‘people constantly transform the recollections
that they produce’ (Zelizer 1995: 216). Seeing these transformations as col-
lective memory’s defining mark moves this approach away from the study of
memories as encoded in habitual practices.

The dynamics of memory approach stresses the presence of the past in
the present through psychological, social, linguistic and political processes
(Schudson 1997). Thus, it allows for the perception of the past, which, as
Mead (1932) argues (see Chapter 4), is not a result of its utility, but rather
a result of the fact that the past matches and articulates present feelings.
Although the dynamics of memory approach agrees with the two previous
perspectives’ rejection of the vision of the past as unchangeable and dur-
able, it is less willing to reject without question the importance of the past
in shaping the present. This qualification of the previous theories’ assump-
tions is a result of the dynamics of memory approach’s attempt to combine
two visions of the past: the permanent and the changing. In addition, this
point is helped by the new perspective’s conceptualization of memory as
being determined by a dialectic past-present relation and therefore con-
stantly in a process of transformation. Above all, the previous perspectives
assume the opposition between history and memory, with collective mem-
ory becoming a distorted version of history. Yet, the definition of collective
memory as not rooted in historical knowledge does not allow, according to
the dynamics perspective, for an examination of the reciprocal workings of
history and memory. Hence, the dynamics of memory theory treats history
and memory as highly interdependent; however, it does warn against

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 71

assessing memory and history, since they perform differently in terms of
each other.

The writers interested in the dynamics of memory approach analyse how,
when and why some social events are more likely to form part of collective
memory. As they do not conceptualize the past as necessarily always linked
to the techniques and practices of power, but view collective memory as a
negotiation process that provides groups with identities, they investigate
representations of the past embodied in historical evidence and symbolic
structures. Researchers writing within this paradigm try to grasp the elusive
memories which are not solely constructed from above, as well as the
dialectic relationships between past and present. Although the dynamics of
memory perspective is not yet a well established and coherent theory, all
these studies share the view of culture as a repertoire which provides us with
cognitive categories for remembering and elaborate on the issue of the tem-
porality and context of remembering. They also further develop Halbwachs’
idea of fluidity of memory by addressing the issue of how memory is
transformed.

An interesting example of a study which focuses on how collective mem-
ory continuously negotiates between available historical records and current
social and political agendas is Schudson’s (1992) examination of Watergate
memories. This investigation of how Americans remember Watergate
demonstrates that we cannot freely alter the past to suit our own interest.
Schudson’s study illustrates that the past endures in the present not only in
formal commemorative practices ‘but also in fundamental processes of
social life’ that are not specifically or self-consciously dedicated to memory
(1992: 65). The examination of Watergate was intended as an investigation
of non-commemorative domains of collective memory, since the memory of
Watergate is rehearsed mainly in congressional debates and institutionalized
in legislation on governmental ethics. Schudson found that although Water-
gate does not function in popular memory, its legacy remains a powerful
part of individual lives and is the essential element in shaping the functioning
of many American institutions. Generalizing his discovery, Schudson states
that the past ‘continues into and shapes the present personally, as it is
transmitted through individual lives; socially, as it is transmitted through
law and other institutions; and culturally, as it is transmitted through lan-
guage and other symbolic systems’ (1997: 6). Schudson argues that previous
theories of collective memory are ‘incomplete, and oddly, inhumane’
because the ways people ‘make use of the past, and the reasons they seek to,
are more devious and complex’ than any of those strands allow (1992: 55).
Criticizing various past approaches to collective memory for denying its
historicity, Schudson points out that they portray people as ‘unrestrained by
their own pasts or by their own location in time’ (1992: 55). According to
him, people are neither solely rational actors who use history to their own
ends, nor are they merely cultural dopes. Recognizing the importance of

72 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

seeing human behaviour as framed within its temporal dimensions,
Schudson examines the continuity of the Watergate framework and shows
how the legacy of this experience ‘imposed itself’ on Americans’ perception
and understanding of yet another political scandal - the Iran-contra story:
‘People did not choose the Watergate frame. It chose them’ (Schudson
1997: 13). Since the language of Watergate created constraints in the hand-
ling of later scandals, it can be said that the past enters into American lives,
laws, and language in ways that people and political elites can only margin-
ally control: ‘The past seeps into the present whether or not its commemor-
ation is institutionalized’ (Schudson 1997: 15). Paraphrasing Marx’s famous
quote about the historical agency of man, Schudson concludes that although
people ‘do indeed rewrite the texts of history’, they ‘do not choose which
texts to work on’ (p. 15).

This point is well illustrated in Barry Schwartz’s works on changes to
Lincoln’s memory from one generation to the next. Schwartz (2000), in his
examination of the reworking of the sixteenth American president’s reputa-
tion, notes that although the quality of Lincoln’s image is transformed (from
that of a simple and accessible person to that of a remote figure), at the same
time an essential continuity is maintained. He argues that Lincoln’s
reconstruction can be acknowledged without denying the real Lincoln and
that ‘memory comes into view as both a cumulative and episodic construc-
tion of the past’ (Schwartz 1990: 104). Schwartz’s study of how collective
memories of Lincoln were used during World War II by American political
elites shows that ‘these image-makers’, while on the one hand projecting
what was meaningful to themselves onto the general public, on the other
hand ‘were socialized by the communities they endeavored to reach . . .
their depictions reflected as well as shaped their audience’s conception of
Lincoln’ (1990: 112). Because Protestant-inspired moralism shapes the way
Americans have always gone to war, Lincoln’s commemoration was used
by elites to endorse the war, to formulate the war’s meaning and make it
comprehensible to the public.

In his most recent book, Schwartz tries to correct the main errors of the
previous theories of collective memory and argues that memory is ‘a cultural
program that orients our intentions, sets our moods, and enables us to act’
(2000: 251). Being critical of the politics of memory approach, he rejects
conceiving memory as a political fact which is ‘made and remade in the
service of new arrangements’, because such a conceptualization would lead
to ‘an atemporal concept of collective memory’ (p. 16). Schwartz’s focus on
the correspondence between memory and historical fact results in his defin-
ition of collective memory as ‘a representation of the past embodied in both
historical evidence and commemorative symbolism’ (p. 9). The fact that old
beliefs coexist with new, as each generation modifies the beliefs presented by
previous generations, illustrates that collective memory adapts to society’s
changing needs and tendencies. This observation forms the basis of

THEORIZING REMEMBERING 73

Schwartz’s criticism of the Dukheimian strand’s insistence of the continuity
of memory. It also focuses his attention on how collective memory changes
and continues at the same time, as well as on the issue of how culture’s needs
for stability and revision are reconciled with one another and with society
(p. 302). Schwartz, in other words, conceptualizes collective memory as
a unifying process that provides a framework of meaning through which
society maintains stability and identity, while adapting to social change.
Consequently, the investigation of Lincoln’s changing and enduring images
leads to the conclusion that while the present is constituted by the past,
‘the past’s retention, as well as its reconstruction, must be anchored in the
present’ (p. 302). However, Schwartz warns that we should not overestimate
the carrying power of ‘the present’ by failing to recognize that the same
present can sustain different memories and that different presents can
sustain the same memory (2000: 303).

To sum up, the dynamics of memory perspective is a broad stream of
investigations into collective memory, which - through the process of ana-
lysing and verifying the previous approaches - has been gaining in strength
and coherence. Although still without a clear focus, this perspective avoids
political reductionism and functionalism. It argues that history cannot be
freely invented and reinvented and that suppression of alternative interpret-
ations and coercion are insufficient to ensure that particular interpretations
will be accepted. Its conceptualization of memory as a contingent product of
social or political actions and as a ground or basis of further action, high-
lights memory’s processual and interactive development as well as its
unstable, multiple and fluctuating nature. Understood as the outcome of
multiple and competing discourses, the contemporary collective memory is
invoked to shed light on political culture. As this perspective manages not to
reduce culture to social structures, while at the same time not downplaying
it, it provides a more comprehensive view of culture and society and
thus escapes the predictability of the presentist approach (Confino 1997).
Studying remembering as ‘a process that is constantly unfolding, changing
and transforming’ (Zelizer 1995: 218) demands that we capture memory’s
processual and unpredictable nature. This perspective runs a lower risk of
reifying collective memory as it is aware of the flexibility and ambiguities of
memory and because it incorporates conflict, contest and controversy as the
hallmarks of memory.

This chapter’s discussion of the four main theories of remembering shows
the development in our understanding of memory. This development is
characterized by both the continuation and the transformation of the con-
ceptualization of the notion of memory. For example, the dynamics of
memory approach - while recognizing that Halbwachs and presentist theory
properly embed collective memory in the present, and accepting other
perspectives’ assertion about memory’s selectivity - develops both points
further. At the same time, while the previous approaches focus on rituals,

74 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

rites and commemorations, the dynamics of memory perspective pays
more attention to memory as a product of narrative activities. Yet, all these
theories give insufficient attention to the interpreting self (Prager 1998) and
none of them are particularly attentive to the level on which memory takes
place (individual and social) nor to the context of memory, which is genera-
tive and constitutive of what we experience as memories. Nevertheless, the
dynamics of memory perspective can be enriched by focusing on the ways in
which individual experience is structured and understood through cultural
narratives. Such a step requires more attention to be devoted to the complex
entanglement of private and public memories as this can provide a means
of showing the ways in which individual experience is always structured
and understood through cultural narratives. In what follows we explore
the relation between individual and social memory, and the importance of
generational and wider cultural frameworks in producing collective
memories.

Further reading

Bodnar, J. (1994) Public memory in an American city: commemoration in Cleveland,
in J.R. Gillis (ed.) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, pp. 74-104.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Coser, L.A. (ed.) (1992) Introduction, in Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective
Memory, pp. 1-36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Halbwachs, M. ([1926] 1950) The Collective Memory, trans. F.J. Ditter and
V.Y. Ditter, London: Harper Colophon Books.

Hobsbawm, E. (1983) Introduction: inventing traditions, in E. Hobsbawm and
T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, pp. 1-14. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Popular Memory Group (1982) Popular memory: theory, politics and method, in
R. Johnson, G. Mclennan, B. Schwartz and D. Sutton (eds) Making Histories:
Studies in History Making and Politics, pp. 205-52. London: Hutchinson.

Schudson, M. (1989) The present in the past versus the past in the present,
Communication, 11: 105-13.

Schwartz, B., Zerubavel, Y. and Barnett, B. (1986) The recovery of Masada: A study
in collective memory, Sociological Quarterly, 127(2): 164-74.

CHAPTER 4

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS

The previous chapter established that the four main sociological theories of
remembering, while rightly insisting that memory and temporality cannot be
detached from each other, do not sufficiently address the issue of the nature
of remembering. In order to explore the remembering process it is not
enough to explore collective memory as simply ‘publicly available symbols
and meaning systems not reducible to what is in people’s heads’ (Olick in
Schuman and Corning 2000: 914). There is also a need to consider how
collective consensus is connected with the actual thought processes of any
particular person and how ‘feeling states and bodily desires, inherited from
the past but prevailing in the present, can rewrite the past in the service of
the present’ (Prager 1998: 83). Thus, in the first part of this chapter we
discuss the embodiedness and embeddedness of memory. In order to further
account for what makes an individual memory social, the following sections
of the chapter will look at the role of generational memory and the signifi-
cance of traditions in shaping processes of remembering.

The embodied self and frames of remembering

‘The past is myself, my own history, the seed of my present
thoughts, the mould of my present disposition’

(R.L. Stevenson, quoted in Tonkin 1992: 1)

Now that we are familiar with the problems and dilemmas faced by social
theories of remembering, the difficulties involved in attempts to capture the
essence of an individual remembrance will not surprise us. The complexity
and variety of individual memory, ranging from long-term and short-term
memory, through semantic memory and procedural knowledge, which

76 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

allows us to learn new skills, to repressed memory, make inquiries into this
subject a challenging task.

Most traditional laboratory-based memory research has attempted to
understand memory as a context-free, isolated psychological process. In
their effort to objectify and externalize memory, current clinical memory
studies focus mainly on the brain, separated from the remembering mind,
and on the past, distinct from an interpreting present. These studies can be
seen as the continuation of the three sciences of memory from the nineteenth
century, although technological advancement has changed their nature (e.g.
neurological studies, which used to focus predominately on the brain, are
now able to work at the level of cell biology). Moreover, new technologies
are responsible for the emergence of a new branch of the science of memory
- computer modelling of memory in artificial intelligence (Hacking 1995:
199). Experimental psychologists have been concerned to understand the
phenomena of remembering and forgetting in order to gain a fundamental
understanding of the brain and sensory apparatus, viewed as a system
capable of selecting, organizing, storing and retrieving information. Modern
cognitive psychology tries to construct a scientific understanding of
memory’s underlying mechanisms and researchers have constructed many
empirical generalizations about short-term memory, flashbulb memory and
recalling. However, despite the rapidly expanding accumulation of know-
ledge about memory, and despite the growing consensus about the extent
and importance of memory distortions (Tulving and Craik 2000), scientists
dealing with memory from the perspective of experimental, developmental,
cognitive and neuropsychology have not yet produced a new, interesting
theory: ‘In short, the results of a hundred years of the psychological study of
memory are somewhat discouraging’ (Neisser 1982: 11).

An individual remembering is a very complicated act, but even more
importantly the relationship between public and personal memories is not a
simple one. For example, there is an enormous difference between appropri-
ated memories and personally acquired memories (Mannheim 1972: 296)
while, at the same time, much of what we seem to ‘remember’ and what we
assume to be our personal memories we have not actually experienced
personally. For instance, many of our childhood ‘memories’ are actually
recollections of stories told by our parents. Furthermore, while the avail-
ability of personal information depends on the content of the remembered
event, people experience these events not only in the context of public narra-
tives but also within the compass of their own activities (Brown et al. 1988:
139-57). What we know of what happens in remembering is that we relive
an earlier perception which is, as in every conscious perception, ‘an act of
recognition, a pairing in which an object (or an event, an act, an emotion) is
identified by placing it against the background of an appropriate symbol’
(Geertz 1973: 215). Thus, memory is produced by an individual but is
always produced in relation to the larger interpersonal and cultural world in

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 77

which that individual lives - for example, one remembers one’s childhood as
a part of a family. However, while recognizing that the cognitive process of
remembering contains much that is social in origin, and thus also the
importance of studying social contexts in which even the most personal
memories are embedded, we want to avoid, as we have already mentioned in
Chapter 1, an oversocialized conception of man. In other words, we attempt
to overcome the valid criticism of Halbwachs’ approach as neglecting the
question of ‘how individual consciousness might relate to those of the col-
lectivities those individuals actually made up’ (Fentress and Wickham 1992:
ix). A very interesting example of how this can be achieved comes from
Jeffrey Prager’s study of ‘false memory syndrome’.

Prager (1998) shows the complexity of the process of remembering by
discussing the case of his psychoanalytical patient, Ms A, who developed a
belief that she had been sexually abused as a child. Analysing her false
memories over the course of numerous sessions, Prager suggests that major
current discourses are the essential factor in producing memory. Ms A’s
misremembering of her childhood, argues Prager, needs to be placed within
the context of the American national preoccupation with the themes of
childhood abuse and victimization, fuelled by the popularity of the
Recovered Memory Movement (see Chapter 6): ‘The atmosphere was such
that few people would not wonder whether they themselves, as children, had
suffered abuse by an adult. The cultural milieu, I believe, was contributing to
Ms. A.’s memories’ (Prager 1998: 76). Arguing that memory is always
embedded, Prager illustrates the intersubjectivity of memory by showing
how the larger interpersonal and cultural worlds in which individuals live
constitute their memories. Even more importantly, he asserts that not only is
the reconstruction of the past always dependent on frames of meaning and
contexts of significance generated in the present, but that it is also shaped by
our emotional experiences.

The recovery of the past rests upon both memory’s embeddedness, which
encourages us to pay attention to the influence of the present on the recovery
of the past, and its embodiedness, which alerts us to the ways in which our
feelings and bodily sensations, generated in the past, help to interpret that
past. When considering both, we cannot avoid, Prager argues, noting their
connection with the notion of self. Memory is ‘embedded because the self is
a “socially constructed” or “socially constituted” entity’ (1998: 71), while
being ‘embodied in a particular person, a person actively engaged in forging
selfhood’ (p. 81). Thus, Prager concludes that the conception of memory as
both embedded and embodied does not explain the whole mystery of the
human process of remembering, which can only be fully grasped if we take
the role of the self into consideration. In short, for Prager, remembering
is ‘an active, interpretive process of a conscious mind situated in the world’
(p. 215).

Arguing that the sociological focus on collective rituals, rites and

78 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

commemorations of present symbols yields insufficient attention to the
interpreting self, Prager examines the internal pressures driving the self to
remember ‘the past in the idiosyncratic ways that are required for one to
situate oneself temporally in a past, a present and future’ (1998: 70). By
combining the conception of memory as embedded and embodied with the
notion of the interactive self, Prager provides us with a sociology of memory
which includes both ‘a conception of mediating selves capable of resisting
dominant cultural modes of thinking’ (1998: 90) and a conception of how
available schemata of understanding or cultural codes influence our desires
and perceptions. Also of further note is his assertion that memories are not
solely the product of an individual mind, but are also the result of an indi-
vidual’s relation both to self and to the outside world, and therefore cannot
exist without input from the larger context. This claim introduces the third
important factor in the consideration of memory, the self, which is seen as
being ‘able to symbolically mediate between possibilities and to exercise
reasoned and reflective judgment’ (Prager 1989: 90).

The concept of memory, seen as a vehicle of the embodied self which itself
is embedded in the larger cultural world, helps Prager to explain Ms A’s
problems with her self-conception. Her effort to find a ‘cure’ for her pain,
and in turn her search for a meaningful language in which to express her
past feelings, can only be understood if we see memory not solely as a
cultural product but also as the result of an individual’s relation to self and
to the outside world. Another argument supporting the view that any
explanation of the remembering experience is not sufficient without the
inclusion of the idea of the self points to the fact that individuals are able to
resist dominant cultural frameworks. In other words, relying only on the
concept of memory as embedded to account for how people construct their
own memories is not satisfactory as it is not sensitive to the issue of how
cultural symbols, discourses and images resonate with the individual. Prager
concludes that memory, viewed as a process of remembering, ‘necessarily
constitutes and reconstitutes relationships, including one’s relationship to
oneself’ (1998: 90). He understands memory as a necessarily intersubjective
vehicle of self-constitution that always operates in relation to others, to the
past and to a future. Consequently, memory is ‘part of this unending work
of selfhood, of organizing and locating oneself in relation to the cultural
language of the cultural universe around one’ (1998: 125).

The self, experienced as a product of a unique past, is the centre of auto-
biographical memory. Autobiographical memory, or memory about the self,
‘is the source of information about our lives, from which we are likely to
make judgments about our own personalities and predictions of our own
and, to some extent, others’ behavior’ (Rubin 1988: 7). Autobiographical
memory also provides a sense of identity and of continuity. According to
Barclay (1988), most autobiographical memories are reconstructions of past
events that are driven by highly developed self-schemata. Consequently, the

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 79

past is reconstructed to fit with personal ‘self-theories’ of how people con-
sider they were likely to act, while their knowledge about themselves is
acquired from routine life events - from what they do, think and feel every
day. Commenting upon Barclay’s findings, Rubin asserts that when ‘we
recall from our lives, we behave more like authors writing autobiographies
than like videocassette recorders’ (1988: 3). Although we ‘convey in precise
and honest terms a plausible and consistent record of our own intentions
and actions’, our recollection is never ‘complete and accurate’ (1988: 3).
Instead we are involved in a never ending dialectical movement in which
‘an individual’s state when remembering can change the memory, and the
memory can change the individual’ (1988: 4).

Memories of most everyday life events are transformed, distorted or
forgotten because autobiographical memory changes over time as we
change (Barclay 1988: 82-9). The best illustration of how our acquired
autobiographical self-knowledge and knowledge about others drives the
reconstruction of plausible, yet often inaccurate, elaborations of previous
experiences comes from Neisser’s (1982) study of the testimony of John
Dean in the Watergate investigation. The media at the time were so
impressed by the depth and detail of Dean’s apparent ‘photographic’ recol-
lections that they described him as ‘the man with the tape-recorder memory’
(Baddeley 1989: 51). In his testimony Dean was able to recall prior meetings
with the president, Richard Nixon, in astonishing detail. Later, however, the
infamous Watergate tapes were discovered, including tapes of the meetings
about which Dean testified, and their comparison revealed that his memory
was rather selective. Analysis of the tape-recordings provided evidence that
Dean had often distorted the scene so as to portray himself as more import-
ant than he actually was. It shows that Dean’s recall of his conversations
with Nixon during his Watergate testimony was accurate about the indi-
viduals’ basic positions, but inaccurate with the respect to exactly what was
said during a given conversation. It can therefore be argued, concludes
Neisser (1982), that memory is often a reconstruction, not a reproduction,
and that an egocentric bias is a normal element of remembering. Auto-
biographical information is remembered because the memory marks an
intersection of personal and societal histories and as such it defines the
person’s self-identity (1982: 48). In the same vein, Barclay and DeCook
(1988: 92) state that autobiographical recollections ‘are not necessarily
accurate, nor should they be; they are, however, mostly congruent with one’s
self-knowledge, life themes, or sense of self’.

Prager’s (1998) argument that memories are embodied in a particular
person’s sensations, feelings, techniques and gestures, brings to our atten-
tion the importance of the body and its habitual and emotional experiences
as both a reservoir of memories and a mechanism of generating them. The
importance of bodies is further reinforced by the argument that the acceler-
ation of change and the resulting alienation of the past leave us today ‘with

80 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

only one fixed point of reference’ - the ‘site’ provided by our own bodies
(Antze and Lambek 1996b: xiv). The body is the main ‘container’ of habit-
ual memory, according to Connerton (1989), because the past is passed on
to us in practices of the body or in the ways of doing and being. The non-
verbal articulation of memory can be seen as a practice of representation
that enacts and gives substance to the discourse of collective memory. If
‘there is such a thing as social memory ... we are likely to find it in com-
memorative ceremonies’ because commemorative rituals are a means of
transmitting social memory (Connerton 1989: 4). While examining the simi-
larities and differences between commemorative rituals and other rituals
(e.g. religious ones), Connerton discovered that commemorative ceremonies
function effectively as mnemonic devices because of their formalism and
performativity, two features that they share with all other rituals. Moreover,
commemorative ceremonies are of cardinal importance for communal
memory because of their ritual re-enactment of persons or events from the
past (1989: 51-67). If, therefore, commemorative ceremonies prove to be
commemorative only in so far as they are performative, we should examine
bodily automatism and habitual enacting: the ‘performativeness of rituals’,
seen as encoded in set postures, gestures and movements, send a simple and
clear message (1989: 58); ‘One kneels or one does not kneel’, and to kneel in
subordination is not to ‘state subordination, nor is it just to communicate a
message of submission. To kneel in subordination is to display it through the
visible, present substance of the body’ (1989: 59). Bodily practices of a
culturally specific kind entail a combination of cognitive and habit memory,
which is re-enacted through acts of performance that remind performers of
a set of rules and principles of classification and distinction (1989: 88). So,
we preserve versions of the past not only by representing it to ourselves in
words or through storing and retrieving information, but also through
commemorative ceremonies, in which we re-enact an image of the past
through memorized culturally specific postures, gestures and practices.

The importance of bodies is reinforced further by the argument about the
role of emotions in the process of remembering. Emotions play an essential
role in any recollection because memories not tagged by ongoing social
emotions tend to fade out, and because emotions are always ‘in part about
the past’ (Nussbaum 2001: 177). Seeing memory as ‘the child of both satis-
faction and frustration’ (Lowewald in Prager 1998: 187) places emotions at
the core of memory, which in turn makes the body an important ‘site’ of
memory, because experiencing intense emotions (both negative and positive)
blurs the Cartesian mind-body distinction (Prager 1998: 183-7; Brison
1999: 42). Such strong sensations help to overcome memory distanciation
and make the recalled memories vivid and somatic. The body as an import-
ant ‘site’ of memory is frequently discussed in studies of trauma (see Chapter
6). Emotional responses, as important affective states that screen out certain
memories and allow for other memories to surface, are inscribed in the

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 81

body. They invoke a particular personal history; within their expression in
the present they bring memories of past experiences that contribute to the
forming and experiencing of the present. Viewing emotions as essentially
interpersonal communicative acts, Prager writes that the embeddedness of
‘past experiences is written in bodily sensation and feelings, recording layer
upon layer of experiences that have been made subjectively meaningful’
(1998: 187).

A good deal of empirical evidence supports the view that emotions,
whether positive or negative, tend to be socially shared and that the social
sharing of emotions results in a strong emotional impact on the exposed
person (Barbalet 1998). An emotional experience provokes a person to talk
about it with others, as those affected attempt to understand and learn more
about their experience. The more intense the personal emotions, the more
likely it is that we will share them with others. Talking about an event is ‘a
form of rehearsal that may aid memory’ because talking or translating an
experience into language, seen as the social mechanism guiding memories,
can help to organize and assimilate the event in people’s minds (Pennebaker
and Banasik 1997: 8). Language - as the primary symbol system that defines
the framework for individuals’ memories - is therefore ‘the vehicle for
important cognitive, and learning processes following an emotional
upheaval’ (Pennebaker and Banasik 1997: 8). The more an event provokes
an emotion, the more it elicits social sharing and distinctly vivid, precise,
concrete, long-lasting memories of the event. This type of memory, known
as flashbulb memory, is seen as being qualitatively different from ordinary
memories and as superior in terms of time because this type of memory is
assumed to be clearer and less affected by time than other memories. Being a
result of a surprising and emotionally intense event, a flashbulb memory is
likely to be long-lasting (Finkenauer et al. 1997).

Flashbulb memories (e.g., connected with assassination of a public figure
or with tragic public events, such as 11 September 2001) allow individuals
to place themselves in a historical context because, when talking with others
about an extraordinary public event, people are able to include themselves
in the narrative. Thus, flashbulb memories, on the one hand ‘are individual
because they consist of people’s memory for their personal discovery
context’ (Finkenauer et al. 1997: 192), and on the other hand, are social
memories because they involve a collective shared recollection of the actual
event, and because interpersonal rehearsal plays an important role in main-
taining and consolidating such memories. Individual memories become
social through interpersonal communication and collective remembering
that locate events in the thematic-causal structures in which they occur.
However, we also experience these events within the compass of our own
activities. This directs our attention to the third and final assertion in
Prager’s explanation of the remembering process, which stresses the role of
the social and cultural context.

82 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

The claim that individual memories are constructed from cultural forms
leads Prager to argue that remembering is achieved ‘not monologically but
dialogically’ (1998: 218). Because the way we remember is determined
through a supra-individual cultural construction and because the act of
remembering is itself interactive, promoted by cultural artefacts and cues
employed for social purposes, and even enacted by cooperative activity,
collective memory can be seen as a shared social framework of individual
recollections. One of the first demonstrations of the reconstructive nature of
our memories, and the first proof that remembering is shaped by our expect-
ations and general knowledge regarding what should have happened as
much as by the content of a specific event, was provided by Frederic Bartlett
(1932). Bartlett conducted an experiment in which white American students
read a Native American legend entitled ‘The War of the Ghosts’ and were
then asked to recall the story as accurately as possible. He found that the
resulting recollections seldom reflected the original story, as subjects tended
to forget pieces of the narrative that didn’t fit their cultural expectations.
Bartlett concluded that we remember and think about the past through
shared frames of understanding, which ‘gives a persistent framework into
which all delayed recall must fit and it very powerfully influences both the
manner and matter of recall’ (1932: 296). Frames of meaning, or ways in
which we view the past, are generated in the present and usually match the
group’s common map of the world. Thus they usually change following
major social shifts that affect entire mnemonic communities. We rely on
them to supply us with what we should remember and what is taboo, and
therefore must be forgotten. Such a conceptualization of frames of remem-
bering as providing us with a ‘menu’ of what to recall suggests the possibility
of the employment of Coffman’s (1974) concept of frame as a means of
advancing our understanding of memory’s embeddedness. Coffman’s
notion is of enormous help here because it enables us to do justice to the
collective side of memory without reducing the individual to a passive
follower of an internalized collective order.

Framing, writes Coffman, is a result of our desire to organize our experi-
ences into meaningful activities. Following the ancient Greek saying that the
man who sees everything is blind, it can be claimed that frames, by directing
our focus, make us notice what is important, therefore ensuring clarity and
simplicity in the definition of a situation. Frames, as an element out of which
definitions are built up, permeate all levels of ordinary social actions and as
such provide a background understanding for events. In Frame Analysis
Coffman argues that an agreement concerning the identity of a particular
event is reached by implying one or more frameworks or schemata of inter-
pretation, which renders ‘what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of
the scene into something that is meaningful’ (1974: 21).

Coffman stresses that the authorship of a definition of a situation does not
ordinarily belong to the people in that situation but that social organization

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 83

and social structure are responsible for framing people’s experience. At the
same time he claims that constructionist views fail to notice the multi-
dimensional and layered nature of situations: ‘It is not just that different
people might have different definitions of the same situations, but that each
participant can be in several complex layers of situational definition at the
same time’ (Collins 1988: 58). Coffman’s avoidance of complete relativism
(as seen in his recognition of the primary importance of the physical and
social worlds, and his interest in analysing the organization of experience)
parallels the dynamics of memory approach’s insistence on the reality of the
past while, at the same time, adding to it the assertion that people do indeed
interpret the past (Schudson 1997: 15). Since people continuously project
their expectations and perceptions, or frames of reference, into the past, and
since they continuously build frames upon frames, the past is reconstructed
in a more complicated way than the simple assertion that the present
influences the past would suggest.

According to Coffman (1959: 247), the reality and sincerity of frames is
protected by the use of various procedures that anchor frame activity and
induce in us a belief that what appears to be real is real; yet it is the material
world that is the ultimate grounding, while all transformations of it are
secondary. His approach allows us to view forgetting as the result of the
disappearance or change of frameworks due to shifts in social conventions.
The fact that there can be many frames and that they are constructed upon
each other, with primary frameworks at the beginning of the process, results
in the multiple nature of reality. While engaging in the process of framing,
people prove themselves to be capable of dealing with many frames without
any problems. They are also capable of adjusting frames to ‘fit’ the actual
occurrence itself in such a way that the definition of the event, as provided
by the framework of shared memory, becomes confirmed. Such a construc-
tion of the social world ensures our conventional conduct, which in turn is
understandable only in terms of the frame. When the fit is imperfect ‘the past
is at once an idealization and critique of the present world’ (Schwartz 2000:
253). In other words, in order for collective memory to inspire and mobilize,
the fit must be imperfect, leaving enough discrepancy to allow for the evalu-
ation of the present. The workings of primary frameworks become most
visible when discussing generational memories and groups traditions.

Generational memory: imprint of a ‘spirit of the times’

The idea of generation is very old. It was used, for example, in ancient
Greece and features in the Old Testament, where it is conceived in a genea-
logical sense as the measure of distance between parents and children.
Despite its long history, the notion of generation has had a brief and not very
successful career as a scientific concept. However, attempts to elaborate the

84 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

idea are interesting because they tend to transcend the arbitrary limits of
conventional academic disciplines. For example, Marias’ (1970) formula-
tion of the concept of generation, while relying on historical method and
tracing the theory back to Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth-century writings,
incorporates philosophical, literary and sociological insights. Seeing gener-
ation as ‘the concrete unit of authentic historical chronology’, Marias
emphasizes that it requires more than merely biological or biographical
information, since we ‘must also know the structure of the world at that
time’ (p. 101). Following Ortega’s idea of generation as ‘the visual organ
with which historical reality can be seen in its real and vibrant authenticity’,
Marias defines generation as ‘systems of prevailing conventions’ and there-
fore as ‘a fundamental ingredient of each of us’ (1970: 102, 101, 83). He
points out that affinity between members of a given generation ‘does not
arise so much from themselves as from being obliged to live in a world of a
certain and unique form’ (p. 104). Since to live is something ‘that happens in
the form of coexistence’ (p. 79) and since generation is our historical world,
it is from this generational basis that we face reality in order to mould our
lives.

Such assumptions about the importance of generation and a ‘spirit of the
times’, which leaves its imprint on the collective memory of a given gener-
ation, have energized various perspectives, from ideas of generation as a way
to explain the feeling of ‘destiny’ among a specific group of people, to per-
spectives arguing that generation ‘alone could help to compose a dynamic
portrait of a society’(Renouard in Nora 1996b: 505). The majority of these
theories seem to stress the uniqueness of each generation and their mutual
distance, yet in reality generations have much in common and tend to
resemble each other (de Tocqueville 1968). In the same vein, Halbwachs
([1926J 1950) argues that there is a ‘living link’ between generations which
ensures that the past is handed on via parents and grandparents and goes
beyond the limits of individual experience. While the generational gap is
perceived as providing a basis for changing the present, generational con-
tinuity is regarded as a source of stability and legitimacy. In other words, as
generation follows generation, each receives an inheritance from its
predecessor, and this intergenerational transmission, or tradition, is a foun-
dation of societal continuity.

It was Mannheim who injected a more sociological perspective into the
notion of generation. His classic essay on ‘The Problem of Generation’,
originally published in 1928, is still the main point of reference for all the
more recent contributions. By insisting that in order to share generational
location in a sociologically meaningful sense an individual must be born
within the same historical and cultural context and be exposed to experi-
ences that occur during their formative adult years, Mannhein endorsed the
conceptualization of generations as something more than merely collections
of age cohorts. His description of links between the generations as a social

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 85

category and memory suggests that theories of social memory should be
a central part of the sociology of knowledge (Plicher 1994). Mannheim’s
theory of generation, designed as part of his theoretical strategy to under-
stand ‘the existential basis of knowledge’ and develop an alternative
approach from Marxism to social change, sees generation as ‘one of the
fundamental factors in the unfolding dynamic of history’ (1972: 288-90).
The specificity and uniqueness of each generation’s experience results in
the different character of their respective collective memories. Moreover,
Mannheim uses this notion in ‘a surprisingly contemporary way to
encompass all types of knowledge a person might acquire, that is conceptual
knowledge of words, world knowledge, skills as well as memories’ (Conway
1997:21).

Stressing the difference between appropriated and personally acquired
memories, Mannheim argues that the memories we acquire for ourselves in
the process of personal development are real memories which we really
possess and which are the basis of our generational identity, since this
type of knowledge is generally better preserved in our memory and has real
binding power (1972: 296). He further specifies that it is the period of late
adolescence and early adulthood which is the formative one for the constitu-
tion of a distinctive memory and personal outlook. The concept of ‘the
inventory experience’, which is an experience absorbed from the environ-
ment in early youth, allows Mannheim to argue that young people’s fresh
encounters with the wider world in this critical stage of their lives become
‘the historically oldest stratum of consciousness, which tends to stabilise
itself as the natural view of the world’ (p. 296). In this perspective, experi-
ence from adolescence and early adulthood is carried forward with self-
awareness and contributes to differences in generational views of the world.

However, for a generation to be a key aspect of the existential determin-
ation of knowledge, its members need to share more than just demographic
characteristics. Mannheim believed that belonging to the same generation
becomes sociologically significant only when it involves participation in
the same historical and social circumstances which ‘endow the individuals
sharing in them with . . . common mentality and sensitivity’ (p. 291). A
unique generational memory, a result of its members’ common exposure to
social and intellectual processes, is dependent on the tempo of social change.
The quicker the pace of social and cultural change, the greater are the
chances that a generation gap will emerge, resulting in older generations
controlling the reigning conceptions of history, while the young quickly
acquire ‘new strategies of action’ for coping with life in unsettled times
(Swidler 1986).

The growing tempo of change, together with the spread of democracy,
can be seen as responsible for today’s new interest in the idea of generation.
With the decline of the importance and visibility of old divisions, know-
ledges and bonds, generational identifications become more important and

86 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

hence it can be said that the ‘generation is the daughter of democracy and
the acceleration of history’ (Nora 1996b: 508). Furthermore, in this era of
electronic communication, globalization of popular culture and the import-
ance of mass media, it is predicted that ‘generations will exist more easily
across social space because they will be able to share more easily a collective
culture’ (Eyerman and Turner 1998: 97). Emerging generational links and
solidarities simultaneously simplify and complicate the network of social
allegiances, as recent developments impose new limits and enhance new
types of connection. These new trends have shifted attention from previous
studies of generations as a variable which can help to predict future
behaviour, to current investigations of generation as a collectivity consti-
tuted by the historical dimensions of the social processes predominant in
that generation’s youth. This recent interest in generational memory has
helped to clarify some uncertainties connected with attempts to identify a
concrete ‘generation’.

New investigations of the collective memories of generations has solved
the problem of how to define a generational cohort, as this type of research
assumes that memories will be structured along the age dimension in ways
that allow us to identify various generations. Unlike the traditional
approach, new research ‘starts with memories and works backwards rather
than forward from generations’ (Schuman and Corning 2000: 915). The
importance of links between generation and memory, so prominent in the
new studies, can be seen as a result of researchers’ realization that, in order
to assume that members of a cohort in terms of age adopt a certain line
of action, there is a need to identify what earlier experiences are carried
forward in memory by that cohort.

Several studies examine the existence of generational differences in
memory by comparing the meaning of adolescent memories with those that
occur in other periods of life (e.g. Schuman and Scott 1989; Schuman
and Corning 2000). In order to verify hypotheses extrapolated from
Mannheim’s theory, this type of research investigates intergenerational
effects, seen as the result of the intersection of personal and national history,
examines the role of various stages in individual lives for memory encoding,
and analyses whether adolescence and early childhood are the primary
sources of political and social memories. In one such study, following
Mannheim’s suggestions that adolescence and early adulthood are stages of
life uniquely open to gaining knowledge about the wider world and that
those from an older generation are likely to interpret events in terms of their
previously well developed view of the world, Schuman and Scott (1989)
asked a cross section of Americans to identify any two ‘especially important
national or world events or changes’. Their research results show that
memories are structured by generational divisions and that attributions of
importance to national and world events of the past half century tend to be a
function of an individual having experienced an event during adolescence or

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 87

early adulthood. By examining the existence of generational differences in
memory, Schuman and Scott’s study proves that knowledge personally
gained is more important, as people do not tend to regard those events and
changes that occur after their early adulthood as important. For example,
older generations were significantly more likely to mention World War II as
one of the major events in the last 50 years than younger people, who did
not personally experience it.

In addition, the meaning of events differs for various cohorts, which con-
firms Manheim’s position. However, some types of event, due to their
‘objective’ importance, are seen as significant by all generations, including
those who were not adolescents at the time. That said even in cases where
the surface memory of an event does not vary according to age, the ‘ meaning
of the event . . . will be different for different cohorts’ (Schuman and Scott
1989: 361). For example, the Vietnam War generation, who experienced the
distrust and divisions of the 1960s, viewed World War II, which they did not
personally experience, as the ‘good war’, while older Americans’ perception
of World War II is constructed around its impact on the world.

Those who chose an event that happened during their adolescence showed
a strong tendency to explain their choice in terms of straightforward per-
sonal experience during that time (Schuman and Scott 1989: 370-3). For
example, even though most Americans over 50 shared a memory of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination, this was identified as an important event pre-
dominately by people who were in their teens to early mid-twenties in 1963,
when the assassination took place, while older people mentioned the assas-
sination less frequently and in less personal terms. The younger people
clearly remembered Kennedy’s assassination ‘in terms of either a specific
“flashbulb” image of hearing of the event itself or a more general report of
its being memorable’ (Schuman and Scott 1989: 373). For instance, a
woman aged 33 at the time of the study said ‘I remember it vividly. I was in
my sixth grade class when the principle came in to announce it’ (p. 373).

Also of interest at this point are the studies undertaken by cognitive
psychologists, whose work on autobiographical memories revealed the
existence of what they termed the ‘reminiscence bump’ or ‘peak’. These
investigations illustrate the importance of adolescence and early adulthood
as the critical stages for memory encoding (Rubin et al. 1998). A recent
study by Schuman et al. (1997) focuses on actual knowledge of the past,
rather than on the spontaneous recollection of past events. By checking their
respondents’ knowledge related to 11 political, social and cultural events
spread over the past 60 years (many of which occurred midway in the life
cycle of present older adults) Schuman et al. confirmed Mannheim’s general
prediction that it is during adolescence that ‘life’s problems begin to be
located in a “present” and are experienced as such’ (1997: 47).

If we combine the discovery that youth experiences focus memories on the
direct personal meaning of events with our previous observation that people

88 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

tend to share their emotionally loaded experiences with others, we can say
that it is the sharing of memories among young people which ensures the
persistence of memories from the period of adolescence and early adult-
hood. At the same time, young people’s sociability and their sharing of
experiences produces an affective basis to their generational identity. Gener-
ational memory allows people to have a certain social identification, both on
an individual and a societal level. As people remember sharing memories
and remembering together, a generational identity is constructed. In other
words, a generational identity is produced through collective practices,
established in response to traumatic or formative events which demand the
sharing of memories: ‘Generational memory grows out of social interactions
that are in the first place historical and collective and later internalised in a
deeply visceral and unconscious way so as to dictate vital choices and con-
trol reflexes of loyalty’ (Nora 1996b: 526).

The most important moments for a generation tend to be unusual histor-
ical events since the more an event generates emotions, the more it elicits
social sharing and is hence better remembered. A generation is a product of
memory because of the formative role of memories of historical events from
adolescence and early adulthood in the creation of a generational culture.
Memory of the past is always intersubjective, a recollection of a past time
lived in relation to other people. However, generational memory is historical
not only because it consists of remembrances of historical moments: ‘It is
historical above all because it is first imposed from without, then violently
internalised’ (Nora 1996b: 523). People remember special emotional experi-
ences from when they were young adults because, in order to make sense
and reflect on these experiences, they talk about them with others. In turn,
this mnemonic socialization, through which we learn what we should
remember and what we can forget, provides bases for generational culture
and identity. Generations, while being products of memory, are at the same
time the main relationship in the production of history. This argument
comes from Davis’ (1989) reflection on Lision-Tolosana’s ethnographic
account of generational relations in a small town in Spain in the period
1900-61. By demonstrating how each new generation takes its inheritance
from its predecessor, reacts against it, and - in response to the particular
historical situation - creates a new environment that again is the object of
reaction, Lision-Tolosana establishes that each generation had substantial
autonomy to remake history.

Generational identifications are constructed out of generational cultures
that provide a set of embodied practices, tastes, attitudes, preferences and
dispositions, which are sustained by collective memories and enforced by
control, through rituals of exclusion, of access to collective resources (Eyer-
man and Turner 1998). Such a perspective, emphasizing the importance of
collective cultural experiences, allows for the adoption of Pierre Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus to express the uniqueness of a given generational memory.

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 89

Using this concept, Eyerman and Turner modify Mannheim’s original con-
ceptualization and define a generation as ‘a cohort of persons passing
through time who come to share a common habitus’. Sharing a collective
culture and habitus provides members of a generation ‘with collective
memory that serves to integrate the cohort over a finite period of time’
(1998: 91). Habitus is a system of durable dispositions to act which are
produced by objective structures and conditions but are also capable of
producing and reproducing those structures (Bourdieu 1977: 72). Habitus
comprises strategies and practices through which social order ‘accomplishes
itself’ and makes itself ‘self-evident’ and ‘meaningful’ (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 127-8), as the dispositions to act are incorporated in social
interaction within a historically formed social context. Being made up of
‘the cognitive structures which social agents implement in their practical
knowledge of the social world’ (Bourdieu 1984: 468), habitus organizes the
way in which individuals see the world and act in it. As such, it is at the heart
of the dialectic between the objective and the subjective, because disposi-
tions and frames of perception are at once historical, social and individual.
Although people internalize ‘the immanent law of the structure in the form
of habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 140), they are still capable of
creativity within the limits of the structure. In a similar vein, Marias (1970:
92) argues that prevailing conventions, which define generations, are
imposed on us but our reactions to them are not. Recent studies of gener-
ational memory also suggest that people increasingly develop greater
independence and sophistication in their thinking, frequently acquiring
knowledge beyond officially available information, and this places limits
on the kind of elite manipulation of collective memory visualized by the
presentist approach (Schuman and Corning 2000).

The concept of habitus, as ‘a past which survives in the present and
tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practices
structured according to its principles’ (Bourdieu 1977: 82), also allows us to
identify the importance of collective memory in creating a generational
culture. Being a ‘principle of continuity and regularity’ (1977: 82), habitus is
a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses identities and
memories constituted by structural differences. Bourdieu’s main focus is
on the role of class location in the structuring of habitus. However, while
examining the construction of collective identity and memory in con-
temporary societies we should emphasize the structuring role of generation
as a mode of distinction based on age differentiation. Other dimensions
of classification, such as class, gender or ethnicity, are also important as
structuring forces and, moreover, all four of them often overlap. Neverthe-
less, in modern society, as Eyerman and Turner (1998) observe, there is a
shift in favour of generation. From the perspective of generational habitus,
all significant social, political and cultural events that a given generation
experiences at first hand can be perceived as part of the social space in which

90 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

that generation defines its collective identity. Within this space the marks
of generational distinction are realized and generational memory is con-
structed. Of course, while the main events provide a space for self-
production of a generational identity, ‘the commercial mass media amplified
and, at the same time, commodified it’ (Eyerman and Turner 1998: 103).

Thus, generational identity can be conceptualized as a social identity
linked to cultural differentiation, based on age distinction. Generational
habitus, which is the foundation of generational memory, and therefore
identity, can be seen as a system of practice-generating schemes rooted in the
uniqueness of the sociohistorical location of a particular generation. Gener-
ational memory is to some degree a question of understanding human vari-
ations by means of history since, as Nora (1996b: 528) notes, generation is
the ‘spontaneous horizon of individual historical objectification’. While any
classification of those generational variations needs to start with habitus,
it should be followed by attempts to grasp the nature of the ‘secondary
variation’ or ‘vital sensitivity’ of a given generation (Ortega in Marias 1970:
93). As generations ‘with greater or lesser activity, originality and energy’
constantly fashion their world they apply their unique sensitivity, rooted in
and carried forward by their habitus, to interpret and make sense of later
developments (Mannheim 1972: 300). The uniqueness of generational
memories and differences expresses itself through a given generation’s
choice of meaning from the past to interpret the present.

However, despite unquestionable distinctiveness, no generation creates its
own beliefs, norms and perspectives. Moreover, some events are so import-
ant that no single generational cohort develops greater knowledge of them
than another, while, on the other hand, some occurrences ‘stick’ in the mem-
ories of people of different ages but who are related by other social charac-
teristics, such as race, gender, social status or occupation. The study by
Schuman et al. (1997), while confirming that early adulthood is a stage of
life uniquely open to gaining knowledge about the wider world and that
knowledge of a past event decreases with cohort distance from that event,
also discovered that some social characteristics interfere with demographic
division in terms of what is remembered. For example, African Americans in
all age groups tend to know more about the historical events significant in
the history of race relations, while women of all ages attach more import-
ance to memories of events related to women’s rights movements. World
War II is now not only widely recalled, but the generational effect is less
sharp and less visible due to the saturation of popular culture with various
recollections of the war and the emergence of many memories of the
Holocaust (Schuman et al. 1997: 71).

Such wider national remembering as well as cases of more narrowly
defined intergenerational communication focus our attention on the essence
of the notion of tradition, understood as a process of handing down
from one generation to the next a set of practices, beliefs and institutions.

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 91

Traditions, while referring to the social transmission of cultural inheritance
within a group, and therefore resembling Halbwachs’ notion of collective
memory, allow us to grasp the complexity of the links between groups and
their respective memories without assuming that the shared experiences
directly imply shared memories. This allows us to analyse how traditions
constitute groups and to examine how groups, ranging from occupational to
national, reaffirm their identities by constructing their memories through
rituals, celebrations and narratives. In what follows, we employ the notion
of tradition to further explore how groups remember.

Tradition: a chain of memory

Writing about tradition as being eroded has itself become ‘tradition’ (Luke
1996). There is a well established tradition of thought according to which
tradition is something static, backward and conservative, something
impervious to change and devoid of reflection, as well as connected with
ignorance, dogma and irrationalism. This perspective is a result of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment which proclaimed tradition to be ‘merely
the shadow side of modernity’ (Giddens 1999: 2). As Enlightenment
thinkers sought to destroy the authority of tradition, itself being a creation
of modernity, they established yet another tradition - the classical tradition
in sociology with its focus on the problem of social order (Nisbet 1966).
Following widespread criticism of this classical approach, since the late
1960s sociology has become preoccupied with the uniqueness of modernity
and its main feature: change’. As a result, it is now common for writings
about tradition to start with an observation about the absence in socio-
logical literature of any analysis of the nature and mechanism of tradition
(Szacki 1971; Shils 1981; Thompson 1996; Giddens 1999).

Apart from sociology’s preoccupation with modernity, the present lack of
interest in tradition can also be seen as a result of the widespread treatment
of the concept - on the one hand, as something of the past which, by its very
nature, is homogeneous and unproblematic, and on the other as something
inherently ambiguous, almost too difficult to conceptualize. Consequently,
as the main approaches to tradition confuse facts with values and diagnoses
with appraisals, the appeal of the notion suffers. This confusion is present,
for example, in the two opposite attitudes towards tradition in the history of
European thought: traditionalism, expressing itself in attachment to and the
idealization of the past, and utopianism, advocating future orientation
(Szacki 1971: 279). Further ambiguities connected with this notion are due
to the fact that traditions can be tied to different interests. For instance,
radical thought, on the one hand, views traditions as ‘inextricably embroiled
in the legitimation of the status quo’, and therefore necessarily conservative,
while on the other hand, it admits that ‘to be really radical, i.e., to go back to

92 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

the roots, presupposed a need to regain a grounding presumably lost in
a corrupt present’ (Piccone 1993: 3). The former, as illustrated by the
invention of tradition approach (see Chapter 3), points to the fact that tradi-
tions serve as a source of support for the exercise of power and authority,
and therefore have an overtly political character and are nothing more than
a set of sociotechniques of integration or projects of social engineering. The
latter perspective argues that traditions can also be responsible for change
because they can offer a uniquely external viewpoint, illuminating the limi-
tations of our own era. Such self-conscious ways of invoking the past seem
to be particularly appealing in today’s society, where many traditions
become outdated and where, therefore, it may become possible to see the
present from an entirely new perspective by ‘juxtaposing rather than
integrating the past and the present’ (Gross 1993: 6).

The notion of tradition, apart from its complex emotional and political
connotations, also causes dilemmas because of its implicitness and con-
sequent flexibility in delineating past events: ‘In the pure tradition, the
actions are guided by precedent without this basis requiring any principled
defence’ (Collini 1999: 55). In this sense, tradition is seen as something that
can easily be brought to an end by more explicit and reflexive attitudes to the
past. At the same time, however, the assumed implicitness of the notion
further contributes to the confusion surrounding the definition of tradition,
with some writers referring to tradition as an object and others describing
it as a process of transmission (Luke 1996: 115). By pointing to tradition’s
role in transmitting in a given community certain elements of culture from
generation to generation, the latter approach does not necessarily rule out
generation’s ability to make its own tradition. On the other hand, the former
perspective’s emphasis on tradition’s faithfulness to forefathers limits the
scope of freedom on the part of a social group to create tradition at will.
Consequently, although it is frequently admitted that in everyday language
the intuitive use of the concept of tradition is widespread and that probably
not all traditions have disappeared, the literature is divided in terms of its
evaluation of the essence and role of tradition in modern life, as well as in
terms of the perceived need for the preservation or recreation of traditions in
the contemporary word.

Despite the above differences, there are at least six common assumptions
in the literature addressing the topic of tradition. First, it is agreed, although
to different extents, that today traditions are so eroded that they seem to
pose no obstacle to anything. Second, the implications of tradition are con-
tingent on the particular historical context. Third, in every society there are
many traditions and generally speaking they are not impervious to change.
Fourth, although tradition is thought of as a liability, heritage - seen as
tradition drained of its content and commercialized - is gaining popularity
(Halbwachs [1941] 1992; Shils 1981: 12; Thompson 1996; Lowenthal
1998; Giddens 1999: 4). Fifth, we need to study the existence of tradition in

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 93

the present without searching for what is beneath it and without asking
whether such memories are authentic. Apart from the invention of tradition
approach, the theories of tradition do not see it as a project of social engin-
eering but as a tradium - that is, anything which is transmitted or handed
down from the past to the present (Shils 1981: 12). Arguing in opposition to
Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) view of traditions as nothing more than
fabrications of the ruling elite, the majority of researchers tend to assert that,
in order to create a convincing representation of the nation, a worthy and
distinctive past must be rediscovered and appropriated (Smith 1997). Yet
these writers admit that traditions, authentic or not, are frequently used as a
sufficient reason for accepting a specific identity or perspective. In this
respect, Halbwachs argues that everything is tradition, while Giddens
(1999: 2) notes that all traditions, to various degrees, are invented.

Finally, the sixth assumption is that none of the main theories of tradition
limits itself to a narrow understanding of the concept, as they all seem to
view tradition as being a broad notion, comprising many aspects. Although
some theories shed more light on tradition’s normative aspect, others are
more interested in its hermeneutic aspect or its legitimation aspect, while yet
others focus on its identity aspect. However, all these orientations acknow-
ledge that tradition cannot be comprehended without accounting for its
other aspects as well. All four aspects are essential for our understanding of
the role of tradition in society, but due to changes in today’s society the
importance of some aspects has increased while the significance of others
has declined. For example, today, as the Scottish Nationalist movement in
the UK, the Catalan independence movement in Spain and calls for a free
Quebec in Canada illustrate, the identity aspect of tradition is growing in
importance. This can be seen as a result of the process of globalization,
which creates new opportunities for regenerating local identities, as well as a
result of the increase in migration, both processes contributing to ‘the quest
for roots’ (Thompson 1996: 104).

The identity aspect of tradition seems to be gaining in importance as
traditions are re-employed as a way of creating a sense of belonging and
strengthening group identities. It was Halbwachs’ assertion that even quite
small groups define themselves partly in relation to the memories they share
which established the connection between collective memory and tradition
on the one hand, and the formation of identity on the other. For Halbwachs,
whose notion of collective memory comes close to meaning the tradition of
more narrowly defined groups, talking about tradition should start with
family traditions and be followed by an examination of different classes’
traditions. According to him, social classes differ from each other not only
because each performs a different function, but because each has different
traditions which serve to legitimatize their position in the social hierarchy.
After calling the ‘totality of traditions’ belonging to social class ‘collective
memory’, Halbwachs concludes that ‘there are at least as many collective

94 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

memories as social classes’. These memories are formed ‘through the simple
play of the professional activity’ and are transmitted from generation
to generation within class boundaries (Halbwachs [1941J 1992: 141).
Halbwachs argues that for different classes, tradition has different, unequal
meanings and significance for society. He writes that the aristocracy, due to
the fact that ‘through generations there continues a totality of well-linked
traditions and remembrance’ (1992: 138), was for a very long time the main
supporter and transmitter of national traditions. Because noblemen’s status
was not defined by their function but rooted in the ‘pastness’ of their titles,
their ‘tradition’ preserved its depth and scope (Halbwachs [1941] 1992:
129).

The normative aspect of tradition refers to sets of assumptions, norms and
models of action handed down from the past that can serve as a normative
guide for actions and beliefs in the present (Thompson 1996: 91). It is
especially emphasized in the Durkheimian approach which views tradition’s
routinized practices as providing a set of beliefs and patterns of action. In
this vein, tradition, as the morality of remembering and forgetting, is seen to
be securing a normative justification for practices and beliefs and providing
people with some kind of direction when they are aimless, offering them
‘some kind of anchor when they are adrift’ (Schudson 1992: 213). In the
case of modern societies, where tradition is often explicitly factual or
descriptive, religious memory is the main example of the normative aspect
of tradition. Hervieu-Leger (2000), in her book Religion as a Chain of
Memory, places tradition, seen as an ‘authorized memory’, at the heart of
religious belief. The essentially normative character of religious memory is
reinforced by the fact of the group defining itself, objectively and subject-
ively, as a lineage of belief (Hervieu-Leger 2000: 125). Religious traditions,
seen as binding members of a believing community to one another and to the
past generations, are entirely oriented towards the past. All religious groups
strive to achieve a unified religious memory which they claim to be fixed
once and for all. However, in reality religious traditions are neither coherent,
united or free of tensions. Moreover, detraditionalization erodes the strength
of belonging to a particular chain of belief, while enhancing small surrogate
memories. In the condition of the decline of common sacred identity, efforts
to ‘reinvent’ memory chains appears inconsequential (Hervieu-Leger 2000:
141).

According to Shils (1981: 15), there is an inherently normative element in
any tradition of belief which is presented for acceptance. Most traditions are
normative in this sense, in that they are intended to influence the conduct of
the audience to which they are addressed. For Shils, who sees tradition ‘as a
guarantor of order and civilization’ (1981: 15), tradition is more than the
statistically frequent recurrence over a succession of generations of similar
beliefs, practices, institutions and works. He points to the normative con-
sequences of the presentation and acceptance of tradition in the name of the

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 95

necessary continuity between the past and the present: ‘It is this normative
transmission which links the generations of the dead with the generations of
the living in the constitution of a society’ (Shils 1981: 24). Thus, tradition
ensures the identity of a society through time and this continuation is
achieved due to a consensus between living generations and generations of
the dead. Shils, however, does not assume that the content of this consensus
is static, nor that each generation creates its own system of beliefs, patterns
of conduct and institutions. The consensus changes through interpretation
by a new generation, whose reinterpretation, actions and beliefs, in order to
become a tradition, must enter into memory, here seen as ‘the vessel which
retains in the present the record of the experiences undergone in the past
and of knowledge gained through the recorded and remembered experiences
of others, living or dead’ (Shils 1981: 50). Thus, memory is more than an act
of recollection, it ‘leaves an objective deposit in tradition’ (1981: 167). The
consensus is maintained through the reinterpretation of what earlier gener-
ations believed, and is carried forward by a continuing chain of transmis-
sions: ‘It is this chain of memory and of the tradition which assimilates it
that enables societies to go on reproducing themselves while also changing’
(Shils 1981: 167).

However, in modern, fragmented, pluralistic societies which are no longer
governed by reference to tradition, where change is valued for itself, and
where the principle of continuity is no longer commonly accepted, one can-
not, as Shils does, ‘make tradition encompass the whole body of traditia of
a society or group’ (Hervieu-Leger 2000: 87). As the modern differentiation
of social fields and institutions produces a differentiation of total social
memory into a plurality of specialized circles of memory, the normative
aspect of a societal tradition can no longer be taken for granted.

The last element of tradition, its hermeneutic aspect, brings to our atten-
tion the fact that tradition also presupposes a set of taken for granted
assumptions which provide a framework for the interpretation of the world:
‘For, as hermeneutic philosophers such as Heidegger and Gadamer have
emphasized, all understanding is based on presuppositions, on some set of
assumptions which we take for granted and which form part of tradition to
which we belong’ (Thompson 1996: 91). In this respect, tradition is an
interpretive scheme transmitted from one generation to the next. Such an
understanding of tradition emphasizes its knowledge-like quality as it is
defined as a kind of truth (Giddens 1992) or tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1958;
Shils 1981; Calhoun 1983). Here traditions are seen as being the ‘tacit com-
ponent’ of rational, moral and cognitive actions (Shils 1981: 33), or as tacit
knowledge which underlines interactions and essentially orders people’s
actions (Calhoun 1983: 896). Polanyi, who argues for the importance of
tacit knowledge in general, views tradition as the tacit knowledge which,
due to its characteristics (such as its flexibility and openness for interpret-
ation) can be reshaped to fit the present situation. While arguing that ‘we

96 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

know more than we can tell’, Polanyi (1967: 4) points out that tacit knowing
provides coherence and integrity to our observations and that ‘this act of
integration’ lends meaning to our knowledge and controls its uses.

Seeing tradition as tacit knowledge that provides presuppositions that we
take for granted and helps us to understand and interpret the world comes
close to Coffman’s concept of the key. The notion of the key refers to the set
of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of
some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on but
independent of it (Goffman 1974: 44). It can be understood here as an
invocation of the past that presupposes an affinity between the past and the
present. Keying, when discussed in relation to a group tradition, can be seen
as the articulation of social, political or spiritual boundaries and conflicts,
which at the same time opens up possible channels of communication
among members of the group. Keying ‘transforms the meaning of the activ-
ities understood in terms of one event by comparing them with activities
understood in terms of another’ (Schwartz 2000: 226). If tradition is, as
Nora (1996b) claims, memory that becomes historically aware of itself,
keying can be seen as tradition’s expression of this awareness. Thus, keying
is more than a group’s sensitivity or mentality, not only because it adds
layers of reality over ordinary activities and provides them with meaning,
but also because it transforms memory into a cultural system (Goffman
1974: 43-4). Keying, argues Schwartz (2000: 226), arranges cultural sym-
bols into a publicly visible discourse that flows through the organizations
and institutions of the social world. Keying plays a very important role in
facilitating our understanding of the world because it transforms memory
into cultural standards, which, as the established sources of representa-
tions, shape our conduct and role performances. Keying, by bringing
together symbolic models of the past with the experience of the present
(Schwartz 2000: 26), expresses the uniqueness of a given group’s or nation’s
memory.

Studying tradition during a national emergency shows how keying works
because it demonstrates how tradition makes dramatic events comprehen-
sible by making ‘tangible the values for which resources and armies are
mobilized’ (Schwartz 2000: 26). Keying’s function of meaning-making
expresses itself by connecting events of separate periods in such a way that
the events of one period are appropriated as a means of interpreting the
events of the other. For example, Protestant-inspired moralism has always
determined the way Americans go to war: ‘To endorse a war and call on
people to kill others and die for their country, Americans must define their
role in a conflict as being on God’s side against Satan - for morality against
evil’ (Lipset 1996: 20). The invocation of this type of moralism is clearly
seen in President Bush’s rhetoric after 11 September 2001: ‘Our responsibil-
ity to history is already clear - to answer these attacks and rid the world of
evil . . . The freedom-loving nations of the world stand by our side. This will

THE REMEMBERING PROCESS 97

be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail. In parts
of the Islamic world, the United States is the Great Satan or American snake’
(quoted in Alcorn 2002: 6). The president’s speech illustrates the workings
of keying and shows how it presupposes the resemblance of the events it
brings together. Americans now, as in the past, as ‘freedom is threatened
once again’, albeit by a different ‘Evil Empire’ from the Soviet Union, are
on the side of good against evil. President Bush’s keying of the attack on
1 1 September as the ‘war against evil’ has provided a symbolic framework
enabling the nation to make sense of the attacks and the ‘war’. Connecting
the present to past events, invoking the American moralist tradition, point-
ing out that ‘our enemies would be a threat to every nation and eventually
civilization itself’ provides a unifying framework of meaning through which
society comprehends recent events and prepares itself to face a new
situation. In this respect, keying, is a cultural programme that orients our
intentions and enables us to to adapt to social change. In other words,
tradition can be a very important part of the process of change. Society does
not proceed from one organizational structure to another by abandoning
all of its old institutions and traditions because, as Halbwachs convincingly
argues, when society ‘becomes too different from what it had been in the
past and from the conditions in which these traditions had arisen, it will
no longer find within itself the elements necessary to reconstruct, consoli-
date, and repair these traditions’ ([1941J 1992: 160). It is only within the
framework of the old notions and under the pretext of traditional ideas that
a new order of values is slowly elaborated.

Although the past is no longer the exclusive source of the present, trad-
ition in some respects retains its significance in the modern world. It is still
an important means of making sense of the world, a crucial way of creating
a sense of belonging as well as a valid source of rethinking the present.
However, with the process of transmission increasingly detached from
social interaction in a shared locale, the growing importance of the media
and the advancement of individualization and globalization, tradition’s
normative and legitimation aspects have declined in significance. While all
these changes do not necessarily spell the demise of tradition or render
traditions inauthentic, they suggest that in today’s society it is impossible to
assume either purely tradition-informed or purely autonomous modes of
being (Heelas 1996). The complexity and diversity of our contemporary
approach to tradition can be seen as a result of a number of factors: the
uprooting of traditions from the social locale of everyday life, the decline in
orally transmitted tradition, the increased role of the media, the deritualiza-
tion of tradition and the growing contact between various traditions
through the media and through the movements of migrant populations
(Thompson 1996: 103-4). In order to understand this new cultural
landscape we need to analyse the shift in the nature and role of the past in
our lives.

98 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

By exploring the embodiedness and embeddedness of memory, this
chapter has argued that the study of remembering should include the con-
cept of self, and any such research should view emotions, gestures and the
whole body as vehicles for memory. When attempting to account for what
makes an individual memory social, following the argument that the past
is seen through shared frames of understanding, we were led inevitably to
Coffman’s notion of ‘frames’ - the elements from which our definitions of
individual situations are built.

The discussion of generational memories and their importance in the
creation of generational culture focused attention on Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus-, a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses the iden-
tities and memories constituted by structural differences. While defining
‘tradition’ as the social transmission of cultural inheritance within a larger
group, it was suggested that Coffman’s concept of the ‘key’ can help to
enrich our understanding of the role of tradition in group memory.

Further reading

Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Mannheim, K. (1952) Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harvest HBJ.

Neisser, U. (1982) Memory: what are the important questions?, in U. Neisser (ed.)
Memory Observed. Remembering in Natural Context, pp. 3-19. San Francisco:
W.H. Freman & Co.

Prager, J. (1998) Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Misremembering. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Shils, E. (1981) Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 5

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES

Memory and history: ways of knowing the past

‘Memory, on which history draws and which it nourishes in
return, seeks to save the past in order to serve the present and the
future. Let us act in such a way that collective memory may serve
the liberation and not the enslavement of human beings’

(Le Goff 1992: 99)

Memory and history are two different ‘routes to the past’ (Lowenthal 1985).
Yet, the ways in which these two orientations are interconnected cause a lot
of confusion. Some scholars accept that memory and history are different,
others strongly object, while still others overlook the distinction and write
about ‘remembered history’ (Lewis 1975), or ‘historical memory’ (Bauman
1982), or even view the historian as a ‘physician of memory’ (Hartman
1986: 1). In order to clarify this confusion, we will now look closely at the
difficulties in distinguishing between memory and history.

A memory orientation towards the past ‘involves the invocation of the
past through ritualized actions designed to create an atemporal sense of
the past in the present’ (Kartiel 1999: 99-100). A historical orientation
implies ‘a reflective exploration of past events considered along an axis of
irreversibility’ and is directed toward developing our understanding of these
events’ causes and consequences. The main difference between the two
approaches is supposedly connected with the fact that memory tends to
mythologize the past, to look for similarities and to appeal to emotions and
is thus considered arbitrary, selective, lacking the legitimacy of history and
ultimately subjective, while history calls for critical distance and docu-
mented explanation, and opposes memory’s non-linear temporality and
its indivisibility from imagination. Therefore memory studies, with their

1 00 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

central questions concerning lived experience and subjectivity, are seen as
bringing different methods of inquiry and different traditions of representa-
tion of the past than history. However, since history combines the objective
as well as the subjective (as it means both: the things that happened and the
narration of the things that happened), and because of the dilemmatic
nature of memory’s object of study (as memory marks the continuity in
the preservation of the past and alters the past in terms of the concerns of the
present), the relationship between the two is far from simple.

From antiquity, when Cicero declared history to be ‘the life of memory’
(Burke 1989: 97), the relationship between history and memory has
reflected the importance of the question: who has the right to tell the story of
the past? Ancient and medieval authors shared the assumptions that there is
no history without its written preservation, that every event worthy of being
remembered has certainly been put into writing by a witness and that this
memory can be relied upon (Funkenstein 1993: 3-20). So, for example,
Herodotus thought of historians ‘as the guardians of memory, the memory
of glorious deeds’ (Burke 1989: 110). Until the nineteenth century, history
traditionally told stories which relied on memories and it was assumed that
‘memory reflects what actually happened, and history reflects memory’
(Burke 1989: 97). Memory was seen as promising a kind of certainty about
the existence of particular events in the past and as enabling people to
believe in the persistence of that past. Because without memory of the past
there is no history and because memory was not perceived as an alternative
to history, the relationship between history and memory did not seem to be
of any concern. In other words, it was assumed that history begins where
memory ends and memory was perceived as ‘a sort of limit on history that
written sources, archives and increasingly sophisticated sources of criticism
allowed one to get beyond’ (Laqueur 2000: 1).

In the nineteenth century, historians attempted to advance history as an
autonomous discipline by promoting the application of scientific methods
and rejecting any connection with memory. The growing processes of the
institutionalization and the professionalization of history also created a new
distance from the past. Furthermore, as history increasingly dealt with the
past absent from living memory (i.e. the past that had to be extracted from
written records) its suspicion of memory also grew. Practitioners of the new
‘scientific’ history, such as Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), rejected ‘the
fictionality of history’ (Arnold 2000: 52) and called for objective historical
analyses that could claim ‘truth’, as opposed to seemingly subjective and
unreliable memory. They established the long-lasting definition of the
boundary between memory and history, according to which memory, as
‘partial and subjective’ was organized by history which, due to its ‘superior
languages of objectivity’, was capable of facing ‘accounts of individuals with
the truth of the archive’ (Eley 1997: ix).

Demanding that history should ignore the present and its meaning as

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 101

much as possible, nineteenth-century historians saw memory as completely
insensitive to the differences between periods. They believed that historical
narratives were a form of science and that history, as public and written, was
verifiable and able to guide private memory (Weissberg 1999: 11). Para-
doxically, great-nineteenth century historians, despite their insistence that
history should only say ‘how it really was’, were themselves ‘giving shape to
the memory of a particular culture’ (Connerton 1989: 16). Their selective
focus on the history of politics, influenced by the rise of nationalism, found
its way into society through their textbooks, speeches and lectures, and thus
facilitated the construction of national memory. Moreover, nineteenth-
century historians’ thinking about history ‘reflected the moods and senti-
ments of the community in which thinking took place’ (Funkenstein 1993:
11). So, history and collective memory were never completely alien to each
other, not even in nineteenth-century history-making practices.

Although the argument for the separation of history and memory
achieved its apogee in the nineteenth century, its most forceful support in the
social sciences came relatively late, when positivistic history was already
leaving the stage. It was formulated by Maurice Halbwachs, whose theory
of collective memory we discussed in the previous chapter. According to
him, historians represent the past differently because history, which estab-
lishes the difference between past and present, ‘starts only when tradition
ends’, while memory confirms similarities between past and present as it
tends to simplify and to see events from a single, committed perspective
([1926J 1950: 78). Consequently, collective memory differs from history in
two main respects. First, collective memory, as the ‘repository of tradition’,
is a current of continuous thoughts, and therefore is marked by irregular and
uncertain boundaries (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 78). History, in contrast,
divides the sequence of centuries into fixed periods and reconstructs the past
from a critical distance. Second, while there are as many memories as
groups, history is unitary: ‘History can be represented as the universal
memory of the human species’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 84). History is an
intellectual, critical and impersonal activity, which emerges as the primary
mode of knowledge about the past when tradition weakens and social
memory is fading. Memory, on the other hand, is always relative, as every
collective memory requires the support of a group, and to be rooted in the
concrete: in space, gesture, image or object. Written history examines groups
from the outside, while collective memory, which a group knows from
within, ‘allows the group to recognize itself through the total succession of
images’ (Halbwachs [1926] 1950: 84). Thus, the group feels ‘strongly that it
has remained the same and becomes conscious of its identity through time’
([1926] 1950: 84). Such a memory rests not on learned history but on lived
history, which is less impersonal, less schematizing and provides a more
complete picture of specific periods and their uniqueness ([1926] 1950: 57).

Halbwachs’ conceptualization of the core difference between memory and

1 02 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

history, as connected with the fact that memory permits social groups to
become aware of their identity through time while history stresses dis-
continuities and is situated outside and above groups, has initiated a long
debate about the nature of this relationship. Today, Halbwachs’ old-
fashioned positivist concept of history is abandoned, with many critics
rejecting his narrow definition of history as ‘naive’ and pointing out that
history cannot ‘literally’ construct the past (Schwartz 1982: 3876), while
a historical narrative may itself become an integral part of the collective
memory (Hutton 1993: 129). Others criticize Halbwachs for undermining
the notion of historical continuity by detaching it from history and for over-
looking the fact that the relationship between memory and history is as
underlined by conflict as it is by interdependence (Zerubavel 1997: 5). Even
Halbwachs’ contemporaries, as the example of the French Annales school’s
interest in collective mentalities illustrates, adopted a more conciliatory view
of the relationship between memory and history than his demarcation of
history and memory.

Prior to and following World War II, less traditional historians rejected
the focus on the history of events and slowly shifted the study of history
towards the examination of past rituals, practices and ways of thinking.
Their interest in the history of civilizations and cultural histories, which can
be seen as an equivalent to collective memory, gradually undermined the
distinction between historical and memory studies. This new fluidity in the
relationship between history and memory created conditions for the develop-
ment of memory studies (Zelizer 1995). One of the first studies of ‘popular
memory’ initiated by social historians and historical anthropologists was
linked to a Marxist-inspired focus on class and dissident voices (Fentress
and Wickham 1992). The 1960s saw the development of oral history, which
was marked by ideas of the social movements of the time and was connected
with ‘history from the bottom up’. However, the professional practitioners
of oral history, who ‘left their ivory tower, mingled with people and dem-
ocratized the practice of their trade’ have been faced with questions about
the ‘objectivity’ of such scientific discourse, its political bias and its attempt
to integrate all cultural differences into a single institutionalized discourse
(Debouzy 1986: 262-4). Such doubts about the ‘truthfulness’ of oral
accounts and the validity of a reliance of on oral records, have encouraged a
rethinking of how representations of the past should be constructed and
reproduced (Tonkin 1992).

The traditional perspective was further undermined by the crisis of his-
toricism, which was contemporaneous with growing critical self-reflection
in academic history and the development of a new interest in memory. The
criticism of history, as developed by Whyte (1978) and Foucault (1977),
pointed to the hidden ideological biases built into any model of representa-
tion. It presented historical narratives as irrevocably tainted with the lan-
guage of power and control, and demonstrated that history privileged the

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 103

experiences of those in a position to leave behind documentary evidence and
silenced those without access to the printed word. With neither memories
nor histories seen as objective, ‘Remembering the past and writing about it
no longer seem to be the innocent activities they were once taken to be’
(Burke 1989: 98). Seeing collective memory as the creative imaging of
the past in the service of the present and an imagined future, studying the
fluidity of images, the commodification of memory and the acceptance of the
debatability of the past have introduced a new dynamic to the interaction
between memory and historiography in the representation of the past.

From the 1980s memory studies has been challenging history’s monopoly
over the past. History’s redefinition of its subject from ‘past politics’ to ‘past
everything’ (Wrightson 2001: 34), the growing power of interdisciplinarity
and the expanding visibility of cultural studies have also provided the
impetus for historians’ interest in memory. As the wider domain of ideas and
assumptions about the past has been claimed for historical study, the trad-
itional conceptualization of the boundary between memory and history
has been destabilized. This current process of redefinition has led to ‘an
extremely fruitful indeterminacy’ (Eley 1997: ix), with history being freed of
disciplinary constraints and becoming ‘an organic form of knowledge’
(Samuel 1994: 442-4). The increasing attention paid to the memory narra-
tives of marginalized groups and the rise of interest in the politics of memory
have resulted in studies of history that closely resemble Halbwachs’ treat-
ment of memory - i.e., as the product of a social group (Hutton 1993; Olick
and Robbins 1998; Weissberg 1999). Followed by successive waves of inter-
est in commemorative politics during the 1990s, these new reformulations
of the relationship between memory and history have led some to argue that
‘history and collective memory can be complementary, identical, oppos-
itional or antithetical’ (Zelizer 1995: 16). However, the voices of historians
who claim that there is a fundamental difference between memory and his-
tory are still influential. One of these belongs to Lowenthal (1985), who sets
history and memory apart because he views historical knowledge as being
collectively produced and shared, while memory, according to him, does not
imply group activity. Another voice belongs to Pierre Nora who also insists,
although for different reasons, that memory and history are two different
orientations towards the past.

According to Nora, the organizer and inspiration behind the seven-
volume Les Lieux de Memoire, published in France between 1984 and
1993, memory has moved into the core of historical understanding as we no
longer live in a world overflowing with living memory. An English three-
volume edition of this work, published in 1996 under the title Realms
of Memory consists of 134 essays by over 100 historians and provides a
catalogue of those places of memory which now form the basis of French
national identity. The order of the three volumes (the Republic, the Nation,
and France) represents a historical progression from unity, through

1 04 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

uncertainty to multiplicity and illustrates the way in which institutions or
symbols which are sectarian in their origins can become, in time, national
possessions.

This ambitious study, conceived as rethinking the French experience,
maps the mnemonic symbols of French cultural identity - from impres-
sionist paintings and gastronomy to the Vichy Regime - and produces a
catalogue of the realms of remembrance from which contemporary French
identities are forged. Nora’s focus on ‘realms of memory’, which are seen as
a cultural support for a particular collective memory, explicitly refers to the
art of memory with its technique of using places and images to facilitate
remembering. This devotion to the tradition of memory also manifests itself
in the similarities between Nora’s insistence that there are as many memories
as groups and Halbwachs’ idea of social frameworks of memory. More-
over, there is a clear resemblance between Nora’s way of opposing history
and memory, according to which ‘memory attaches itself to sites, whereas
history attaches itself to events’ (Nora 1989: 22), and Flalbwachs’ con-
ceptualization of history as universal, abstract, and in contrast to relative
and particularistic memory. For both Nora and Halbwachs, memory, being
reduced to commemoration, is a distorted version of history. This means
that they cannot examine collective memory ‘as the reciprocal working of
history and commemoration’ (Schwartz 2000: 11).

Nora, like Halbwachs, sees memory and history as ‘in many respects
opposed’ and describes natural memory as spontaneous, singular and filled
with gesture and emotion, while pointing out that history is reflective and
universal (1996a: 4). Living memory, which is ‘subject to the dialectic of
remembering and forgetting’ as well as censorship and projections of all
kinds, is rather unpredictable because it is ‘capable of lying dormant for
long periods only to be suddenly reawakened’ (Nora 1996a: 3). History, on
the other hand, is always incomplete, critical and ‘suspicious of memory’. In
this respect, Nora’s conceptualization of history differs from Halbwachs’
view. While Halbwachs’ aspiration was to keep memory and history apart,
Nora is interested in exposing their changing relationship to each other.
Over the past century, history, which always distrusts memory and desires
to ‘surpass and destroy it’, has aimed to equip itself with a ‘critical method
whose purpose is to establish true memory’ (1996a: 4).

Nora’s insistence that we are ‘obsessed with memory’ at the same time as
we have destroyed it with historical consciousness, resembles the paradoxes
of late nineteenth-century Europe’s memory discourses. Today, as at the end
of the nineteenth century, it is the acceleration of history which is seen as
destroying familiarity and tradition and as being responsible for the
renouncement of memory in contemporary societies. The current causes of
this acceleration (i.e. globalization, democratization and the advent of mass
culture) have undermined society’s anchoring in the past and have brought
about an age of historical forms of representation (Nora 1996a: 6). In the

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 105

past, ‘history was holy because the nation was holy’ (1996a: 5) and histor-
ians, as pillars of national continuity, provided legitimization to the nation.
However, with the state divorced from the nation, memory as a living
presence vanished and history gave way to the legitimization of society in
terms of the future. In other words, today we live with memory constantly
on our lips but in societies without living memory. While historians’ critical
self-awareness and self-reflection destroyed all assumptions about the truth
in their presentation of the past, remembering becomes a matter of
reconstruction of memory and the responsibility for remembering is passed
to the archives: ‘Now that historians have abandoned the cult of the docu-
ment, society as a whole has acquired the religion of preservation and
archivalisation’ (Nora 1996a: 8). The scale of collecting expands in inverse
proportion to our depth perception, so as the importance attached to
artificial and symbolic substitutes for memory increases, historians have ‘less
and less to say about more and more’ (Nora 1996a: 13).

Prior to the nineteenth century, memory was such a pervasive part of life
that people were hardly aware of its existence. Now, as the consequence of
the expulsion of rituals from modern life, memory is no longer authentic-
ally lived and specific places of memory do not simply arise out of lived
experience - instead they have to be created. Hence, history can claim a
victory as we collect, exhibit and catalogue the form but not the substance
of memory: ‘The trace negates the sacred but retains its aura’ (Nora 1996a:
9). This transition from the first immediate form of memory, which was
in less rapidly changing societies taken for granted, to indirect, archival
memory, leaves us with realms of memory which, as moments of history
are ‘no longer alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells left on the shore
when the sea of living memory has receded’ (1996a: 7). Memory has become
a matter of explicit signs, not of implicit meanings; in this sense, it is
more a matter of associations, allusions and symbols. Nora distinguishes
four types of realm or site of memory: symbolic sites (commemorations,
pilgrimages, anniversaries, emblems); functional (manuals, autobiogra-
phies, associations); monumental (cemeteries, buildings); and topographic
(archives, libraries, museums). These realms are the last remaining places
where we can still read our own past and history. Their exploration helps
to refill ‘our depleted fund of collective memory’; however, they invoke
not so much a sense of identity with those remembered, but rather a sense
that we should remember them precisely so as not to be like them (Nora
1996a: 20).

Nora’s contribution to the debates over modes of inquiry into the past is
connected with his reformulation of Maurice Halbwachs’ distinction
between memory and history in the context of modern conditions, where
history is ‘no more than the official memory a society chooses to honor’
(Hutton 1993: 9). Stressing the influence of place and time on the direction
of historical pursuit, he argues that now, as society has lost its anchoring in

1 06 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

the past and as the state has lost its control over national memory, history
can only study yesterday’s places of memory as the remaining points of
intersection between memory and history. In Nora’s study of ‘the historical
present’ memory is an essential medium and ‘an object of study for its own
sake’ (Carrier 2000: 43-4). Memory, seen as plural, mediated and fluid, is
an instrument of both construction and deconstruction of symbols and their
meanings. However, such an examination of the evolution of the representa-
tion of events and cultural traditions reduces memory to a history of the
past’s images (Hutton 1993: 22).

Some critics have strongly objected to Nora’s concept of history as highly
nostalgic and have rejected his idea that memory and history are different
and that the latter is superior to the former (Tonkin 1992; Sturken 1997).
Nora is perceived as ‘a cultural conservative’ because his analysis is under-
stood to be a backward-looking lament over the diminution of our com-
mitment to the past (Schwartz 2000: 313). His idea of memory is rejected as
solely consisting of an inventory of ‘official’ places of memory, and thus as
being an expression of coercive national memory (Samuel 1994: 11). Nora’s
argument is also criticized for not having relevance beyond France, while the
Frenchness of his position is seen as responsible for his cultural pessimism
(Winter and Sivan 1999b: 2). Moreover, Nora’s presentation of the French
symbiotic relationship between memory and the country’s most funda-
mental social cleavages can be criticized for reducing the explanation of the
uniqueness of France’s lack of excitement over memory to one factor: the
decline of the importance of sectarian divisions in this nation’s politics
(Collini 1999).

With much evidence that rituals, which Nora sees as vanished from mod-
ern societies, are still alive, critics insist on the continuity and significance of
collective memory in contemporary nations (Noyes and Abrahams 1999).
Arguing that difficulties faced by migrants trying to enter the French culture
can be seen as an indication of the continuous importance of a popular
memory, Winter and Sivan (1999b: 2) suggest that collective memory’s
obituary, as written by Nora, is premature and misleading. Also, the scope
of various recent celebrations and initiatives seems to be indicative of the
continuity of interest in memory. The bicentenary of the Revolution in
1989, after all, was a highly charged and politically contested event. More-
over, with the French government spending more on museums and cultural
activities per capita than does any other western country (Winter and Sivan
1999b: 2), it seems that France continues to be engaged with the celebration
of the past. So, Nora’s anxiety over the fate of living memory, resulting from
his devotion to the national culture, is a classic case of Minerva taking flight
at dusk.

Nora’s work has inspired many new studies of memory. Dramatic growth
in this area over the two last decades has also been enhanced by the accept-
ance and inclusion of particularistic memories into history narrative, due to

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 107

‘a healthy result of decolonisation’ (Klein 2000: 138). This revival of interest
in collective memory, in turn, remakes ‘historical imagination’ (Klein 2000:
128) and leads to the blurring of boundaries between history and memory.
The recent challenge to theories assuming the split between history and
memory reveals how complex, tense and politically charged the relationship
between history and memory can be and shows that for each memory there
is a counter-memory, while works addressing the issue of the politics of
memory illustrate the political nature of the relationship between memory
and history (Laqueur 2000: 1).

The interdependence of history and memory has been enhanced by a cul-
tural turn in history, which has highlighted the importance of cultural narra-
tive. This cultural turn proposes that history, as another form of narration,
does not have any particular claim to truth. Its interest in imaginative repre-
sentations of the past restores the significance of memories for historical
inquiry and legitimizes methodological pluralism. Now, ‘memories continue
to be memories, and it is their relation to lived historical experience that
constitutes their specificity’ (Radstone 2000: 11), while historians are ‘con-
sumed by epistemological doubt and are not sure if they can find out what
actually happened in the past’ (Reynolds 2000: 5). As history becomes
one among many types of narrative and memory is appreciated for its
authenticity and truthfulness, the boundary between memory and history is
becoming fluid (Anzte and Lambek 1996b).

Today’s transformation of the relationship between these two orienta-
tions makes some ‘sort of reconciliation’ between memory and history
possible (Laqueur 2000: 2). Habermas (1997), for example, rejects the
simple dichotomy between memory and history and argues that ‘a historical
consciousness ideally performs critical work on memory in order to undo
repression, counter ideological lures, and determine what aspects of the past
justifiably merit being passed on as living heritage’ (LaCapra 1997: 99). On
the other hand, memory which can ‘sometimes [be] retreating, sometimes
overflowing’ in its relationship to history (Le Goff 1992: 54) helps to
delineate significant problems for historical research. This more conciliatory
approach conceptualizes history’s links to memory in a very flexible way
and allows us to talk about the representation of the past as a continuum:
‘the constructs of public-collective memory find their place at one pole and
the “dispassionate” historical inquiries at the opposite pole’ (Friedlander
1993: viii). It will likewise view conflicts between memory and history as a
manifestation of ‘the tension between the isolating, intellectual stance of
critical reflection’ (history) and ‘the all-consuming moment of ritual, com-
munal bonding’ (memory) (Katriel 1999: 127). In other words, rather than
insisting on an opposition between memory and history, any attempt at a
general interpretation of the past has to accept the interrelations of history
and memory and has to rely on both their methods of inquiry. Memory is a
special kind of knowledge about the past, which stresses the continuity, the

1 08 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

personal and the unmediated (Warnock 1987: 37). To comprehend the
nature of memory requires the clarification of the type of causal connection
between the present recollection and past events. Only by understanding
that what memory supplies ‘is not an itemized past but a continuity of
conscience in which I recognize myself as a continuity of identity and my
present experiences and engagements as my own’ (Oakeshott 1983: 15), will
our remembering of the past not be confused with our historical understand-
ing of it.

Memory and time: the continuity of the past

‘situated outside time, ivby should he fear the future ?’

(Proust [1922] 1989)

Since Hobbes’ observation that without memory we would have no idea of
time, the notion that there is a connection between memory and time has
been a common feature of various conceptualizations of memory (Warnock
1987: 18). These approaches assume that time, being constitutive of human
experience, is captured in memory as it provides links between the past and
the present. However, memory also problematizes our relation to time since
its working suggests that in the social realm the past is not a fixed entity and
that there are two ways of speaking about the past: as something that is no
longer there but has been there, and as something that was once there (Baert
1992; Hacking 1995; Ricoeur 1999).

Memory’s non-linear temporality poses difficulties for history as it
replaces history’s quest for the truth of the past with a revision of the past
promoted by later events. It makes the past problematic because in memory
‘the time line becomes tangled and folds back on itself. The complex of
practices and means by which the past invests the present is memory:
memory is the present past’ (Terdiman 1993: 8). Furthermore, while history
focuses on the historicity of past events, memory, by contrast, is seen as not
having a sense of the passage of time; it denies the ‘pastness’ of its objects
and insists on their continuing presence (Novick 1999: 3-4). Time is also a
problem for memory because there is no single time but a variety of times as
there is no common frame of time to which all humans continually relate
(Adam 1990; Hutton 1993). Moreover, an indeterminacy of the past, as
exemplified by continuous changes in retroactive rediscriptions of past
people and their actions means that the past is not fixed (Hacking 1995).
Today, even more importantly, one of the main problems connected with the
relationship between memory and time is the replacement of the past by the
extended present and the blurring of the relations between public time and
private time.

These complex relations between time and memory suggest that the

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 109

temporal dimension cannot be captured by accepting the closed linear view
of time, which assumes that there is a steady gradual movement in one
direction and which does not take into account dialectical relationships
between social reality and its past and future. Social scientists, who until
recently have neglected the issue of time, now insist that people should be
conceived in relation to their representation of the past. They emphasize the
distinction between natural and social time and a need to grasp the nature of
people’s experience and use of the past (Baert 1992). Moreover, there is a
necessity to account for time as a historical concept and for the changing
role of time in culture and society, which brings with it changing attitudes
to, and the role of, memory in social life. A short survey of the main ways
of conceptualizing the relationship between memory and time will show
different perspectives on the nature of the past and on people’s representa-
tion of their own past. These positions vary from insisting on the pastness
of the past, through approaches regarding the past as being continuously
recreated and reformulated into the emergent present, to positions stressing
the timelessness of the past.

Time has always puzzled people, as the numerous metaphors and myths
of its divine image illustrate. However, time was not a central philosophical
concept until the demise of metaphysics (Heller 1999). There were, of
course, famous doctrines of time - for example, Aristotle’s definition of time
as the measure of motion, which could be contrasted with Augustine’s idea
of internal time as the measure of both motion and rest (Funkenstein 1993).
However, in ancient metaphysics, ‘the concept of time is not really a concept
of time’ but is the accomplishment of the circular motion, the constant
repetition of the same (Heller 1999: 174). The modern understanding of
time, initially helped by the Jewish-Christian tradition’s conceptualization
of historical time, dates from the arrival of modernity (Baert 1992). The shift
in our approach to time is seen as the bookmark dividing premodernity from
modernity. In the former period, the Christian tradition dictated thinking
about time mainly in terms of the future, presented statically and spatially as
the time of the Last Judgment. Modernity has introduced the concept of
linear historical time and the notion of secular future as well as the concepts
of progress and truth as offsprings of modern temporality. Time plays
a central role in facilitating the dichotomization of the universe into
sacred and profane. It also serves to keep the private and public spheres of
life apart, while the relations between temporal arrangements and group
formation are essential in solidifying in-group sentiments as well as estab-
lishing inter-group boundaries to separate group members from ‘outsiders’
(Zerubavel 1981; Adam 1990; Baert 1992).

It was Henri Bergson (1859-1941), the most celebrated French phil-
osopher of his day, who introduced the notion of time into the very core of
philosophical reflection. Arguing that it is memory that makes time relative,
he declared that ‘the moment has come to reinstate memory in perception’

1 1 0 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

(Bergson [1896] 1996: 42). He placed our persistence through time at
the centre of his conceptualization of memory as subjective experience
(Warnock 1987: 55). Seeing memory and time as the most fundamental
philosophical problems, Bergson argued that memory brings the past into
the present and therefore the past ‘might act and will act by inserting itself
into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality’ ([1896] 1996:
44). As memory binds perceptions into a continuum, ensuring, by the same
token, the unity of the self experienced, a flow of inner life which reveals our
true nature counters the distinction between a past and a present self and
makes time relative.

Bergson introduces two different concepts of time. The first is temporal
duration, dune, or ‘inner time’ which is ‘defined less by succession than by
coexistence’ ([1896] 1996: 44). Our intuitive perception of this time is the
source of knowledge about the self. As pure duration is fluid, without
boundaries, without a beginning and without an end, the subjective insight
into inner time is constituted in continuous emergence (Bergson [1896]
1996). In contrast to the richness and variety of inner subjective time, which
ensures human creativity and spontaneity, and provides access to philo-
sophical and spiritual knowledge, the second type of time, temps, belongs to
the material, practical world. It is objective, reversible, quantitative and
divisible into spatial units. The quantitative type of time, measured by the
mechanistic clock, answers the needs of ordinary life where there is little
scope for human intuition and where a spatial concept of time is essential.
This homogeneous and mathematical time is a category imposed on experi-
ence by the conscious and practical mind. It ensures that the flow of experi-
ence is turned into a manageable and spatially separate set of things (Berg-
son [1896] 1996; Warnock 1987: 18-29; Adam 1990; Coser 1992: 7-9).

Memory, seen as preserving our own awareness of inner time, overcomes
the dualism of body and mind because while being informed by sense
impressions it is not absolutely dependent upon the matter of the brain. It is
never a simple representation of the past, as it is perceived as linking
together the past, present and future. Memory is viewed as temporally pro-
longing ‘the past into the present’ (Bergson [1896] 1996: 210) by animating
all past perceptions that are alike. Bergson divides the mnemonic realm into
two distinctive forms of memory: ‘habit’ memory (used daily to tell us what
things are) and ‘representational’ memory, which is a ‘pure’, involuntary
and spontaneous form through which we know ourselves and in which we
are aware of ‘pure duration’ (Bergson [1896] 1996: 213).

According to Bergson, the whole of past experience is always present at
the level of the unconscious, where all experiences exist timelessly. The unity
and completeness of past experience stored up in the unconscious ensures
that, as nothing is forgotten, nothing is destroyed. The notion that memory
retains everything was the essential element of Bergson’s theory of intuition
and human creativity which argues that it is not science or reason but rather

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 1 1 1

intuition and contemplation that ‘can unravel the riddles of human exist-
ence’ (Coser 1992: 7). His concept of spontaneous memory, which brings to
our attention the importance of feelings, emotions, intuition and people’s
ability to unify duration, has been very influential in modern philosophy,
with Sartre and Heidegger, for example, arguing that time expresses the very
nature of human subjectivity and that the past is not existentially finished,
while the future is already existentially present. Bergson’s ideas have also
found their way into literature, with Proust’s famous novel Remembrance of
Things Past [1922] 1989) being the prime example.

Proust, like Bergson, privileges memory as the means for transcending
subjectivity and perceives time as consisting of a series of moments. He, like
Bergson, also believed that our memory preserves the past. As ‘each day of
our past has remained deposited in us’ (Proust [1922] 1989, Part 1: 844), we
cannot escape involuntary remembering, which is famously illustrated by
the narrator’s memory of childhood that comes to him with the taste of a
madeleine (a cookie) dipped in hot tea. When he unconsciously recognizes
the taste of the madeleine, the past is reborn and lived again. Thus, he
becomes ‘an extra-temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissi-
tudes of the future’, and even anxiety on the subject of his death ceases (Part
3: 904). With this ‘escape from the present’, at moments when the past is
reborn in him, the narrator is able to ‘rediscover days that were long past,
the Time that was Lost’ (Part 3: 904).

Bergson and Proust also shared the idea of the unreliability of the data
provided by consciousness as they both distrusted the overt content of
mental representations. They both saw remembrance as an unpredictable
adventure and both were suspicious of consciousness because its practical
orientations, interests and workings of habit can conceal the nature of
reality and lead to self-deception (Terdiman 1993: 200-9). When speaking
of the reality of life which the hero of his novel Jean Santeuil is unable to
perceive, Proust explains: ‘we cannot experience [reality] while we are living
its moments, because we subordinate them to a self-interested purpose, but
these sudden returns of disinterested memory [make] us float between the
present and the past in their common essence’ (quoted in Terdiman 1993:
209).

However, Proust’s involuntary memory, although it cannot be delib-
erately sought, is not experienced on the level of unconsciousness since we
can only emotionally experience the past when the power of present sensa-
tions to call up memories is followed by the deliberate recollection of the
past. What was given to the narrator through an involuntary association
generated by the taste of a madeleine was not a feeling of the past but rather
a feeling of the authenticity of reality: ‘something that, common both to the
past and the present, is more essential than either both of them’ (Proust
[1922] 1989, Part 3: 905). Thus, according to Proust, the meaning of our
experience materializes in memory and what we call reality is a certain

1 1 2 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

relationship between sensations and memories which surround us at the
same time. Our ability to grasp ‘a fragment of time in the pure state’ (Part 3:

905) means that we have achieved ‘a universal and timeless understanding
of what things are alike’ (Warnock 1987: 95). For Proust, time ‘is no fugi-
tive, it remains present’, while memory, by overcoming the gap between past
and present, ‘suppresses the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimen-
sion in which life is lived’ (Part 3: 1087). Being free from ‘the order of time’
is to be miraculously liberated and brings joy as the word of ‘death becomes
meaningless: situated outside time, why should he fear the future?’ (Part 3:

906) .

Bergson’s emphasis on subjective time and individualistic consciousness
lower the attractiveness of his ideas to social scientists, although many of
his concepts have been debated as phenomenologists continue to draw
attention to the lived quality of experience and to the inner duration of
action. Halbwachs, Durkheim and Mead, although accepting the import-
ance of many of Bergson’s ideas, actively criticized them. Durkheim, who
conceptualizes time not as intuition but as social construction, was the first
to say that all time is social time. He saw time not as inner time or duration,
but rather as an attribute of a social group which is fixed by the rhythms of
collective life and which, in turn, ensures the group’s regularity and stability:
‘A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the
same time its function is to assure their regularities’ (Durkheim [1912] 1965:
10-11). According to Durkheim, time is abstract and impersonal, while its
collective character, seen as a result of the fact that there ‘is a time common
to the group’, makes social time ‘a veritable social institution’ ([1912] 1965:
23). As Durkheim notes, observation ‘proves that the indispensable guide-
lines, in relation to which all things are temporally located, are taken from
social life’ (p. 10). Time, as an objectively given social category of thought
produced within societies, varies from society to society.

A similar argument was developed by Halbwachs ([1926] 1950: 84), who
rejected Bergson’s individualism and his concept of inner time and instead,
accepted Durkheim’s perspective and argued that ‘human time is defined by
chronological frameworks on which social groups agree’ ([1926] 1950:
126). Seeing time as ‘real only in so far as it has content, in so far as it offers
events as material for thought’, Halbwachs pointed out that ‘each group
immobilizes time in its own way’ and that this recall depends on the power
of the group that frames the memory ([1926] 1950: 127, 126). Halbwachs
also questioned Bergson’s insistence on the significance of intuition and
dreams as not reflecting the essence of human experiences which are always
taking place in a social context and are characterized by continuity and
regularity. Criticizing the French philosopher’s view that nothing is forgot-
ten, Halbwachs pointed out that when memories do not find some form
of externalization they wither. Rejecting the idea that the whole of past
experience is always present to us Tike the printed pages of a book’ and that

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 1 1 3

remembering is a removal of obstacles causing forgetting, Halbwachs
([1926J 1950: 75) noted that forgetting is not necessarily an individual
failure, but rather a deformation of recollections due to ‘vague and piece-
meal impressions and remembering a process of fitting them together under
suitable stimuli’.

Mead (1929, 1932), who was among the first to demonstrate systematic-
ally the importance of time in social reality, also objected to Bergson’s idea
of the primacy of the introspective experience of time (Joas 1997). For him,
time is embedded within actions, reality existed in the present and the pres-
ent implied the past and the future. He understood all past as reconstructed
in a present and argued that the past itself is not a past at all - only its
relation to the present is the grounds for its pastness. Thus, according to
him, the past is continuously recreated and reformulated into different pasts
from the standpoint of the emergent present. Although the pasts are empir-
ical in their consequences for current conduct, the only test of the truth of
what we have discovered about the past is this past’s continuity in our
shared consciousness.

Mead’s idea of collective memory and his insistence on the discontinuity,
adjustment and selectivity of the past are in many aspects similar to
Halbwachs approach. Both men stress that people use the past to give mean-
ing to the present and to exercise the full spread of power across time and
space. Moreover, Mead, like Halbwachs, believed that society’s understand-
ing of its past is always instrumental to the maintenance of present beliefs
and values. However, while Halbwachs sought to show how the present
situation affects our perception of the past, Mead’s aim was to understand
the use of historical knowledge in interpreting the present, and therefore he
placed accents differently. Schwartz etal. (1986), in their analyses of the role
the story of Masada - the case of ‘recovered history’ - played in Jewish
culture, convincingly illustrate that for Mead collective memory can be
selected not for its value in promoting legitimization of power but for its
capacity to give meaning and assistance in interpreting the past.

The story of Masada, an unsuccessful battle in ad 73 when 960 Jewish
patriots killed themselves rather than surrender to Roman troops, fascinated
Jews living in interwar Palestine not because of its heroic message but
because it explained the precariousness of their situation and because it
articulated the ambiguity of their feelings. Consequently, it provided them
with a chance to rethink and define in a new way their destiny and solidarity.
The content of collective memory reflects its objective fit with reality, not its
utility: ‘collective memory is drawn not to that which is useful but to that
which is appropriate’ (Schwartz etal. 1986: 160). We tend to accept as valid
stories that are appropriate as objects of collective identification in a given
context, so in times of crisis or insecurity, different stories present them-
selves to us as appropriate from those articulated in times of prosperity.
Mead believed that pasts are remembered and constructed in ways that meet

1 1 4 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

group needs and that the kind of past events most invaluable in a given stage
of a group’s life are those able to enhance a group’s survival (Schwartz et al.
1986). The example of Masada, which ‘is both a complex of uncontested
historical facts and a powerful component of modern Israel’s national
mythology’, illustrates that its mythological function ‘does not in the least
invalidate its historicity, nor would its demythicization enlarge our historical
knowledge’ (Assmann 1997: 14). In other words, the validity of a given
perception of the past is not a result of its utility and has nothing to do with
its truth values, but is rather a result of the fact that the past matches and
articulates present feelings.

Another important point developed by Mead’s dialectic approach is his
suggestion that the reconstruction of the past occurs when people realize,
through self-reflection and awareness, the inadequacy of the old presenta-
tion of the past. New pasts are most likely to emerge during periods of rapid
change. In the context of change, conditions of insecurity and destabiliza-
tion can be routinized by the reconstruction of the past in such a way as to
assimilate it into a meaningful flow of events: ‘The past which we construct
for the standpoint of the new problems of today is based upon continuity
which we discover in that which has arisen and it serves us until the rising
novelty of tomorrow necessitates a new history’ (Mead 1929: 235). Mead’s
theory can be interpreted as the conceptualization of memory, if not as a
motor of change, as Baert (1992: 141) suggests, then at least as an instru-
ment of normalization, as a means of reconstructing a disturbed societal
pattern of living into its normal condition.

Mead was a constructive pragmatist who believed that the past arose in
such a way as to enable ‘intelligent conduct to proceed’ against situational
problems (Mead 1932: xiii, 29). Baert (1992: 86) summarizes the role that
the past plays in Mead’s theory by pointing out that the presentation of the
past can be either a past-in-now or a past-for-now. The former, past-in-now,
refer to the use of the past in the present, when people adopt passive
attitudes towards the past which experiences its power through practical
consciousness and tacit knowledge. The latter, past-for-now, refers to the
symbolic reconstruction of the past in the present, when people are active in
respect of their past as they reflect upon underlying structures.

The sociology of time has recently become a distinct field of research
illuminating its social construction, the temporal aspects of societies and the
present specificity and transformation of time (Zerubavel 1981; Adam
1990; Baert 1992). Following Heidegger’s and Schutz’s focus on the prob-
lem of being and becoming, many writers analyse ways in which body,
action and space merge across a time horizon. Researchers from a wide
range of disciplines suggest that there are various senses of time and point to
the changing role of time in culture and society, and changing attitudes to
time, including changes in our relationships to the past. Overall, new studies
of time show that contemporary societies question the neutrality of time and

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 1 1 5

its linearity, while proclaiming the death of time, the end of the future and
the globalization of time (Young 1988; Hassard 1990; Novotny 1994;
Adam 1998).

The breakdown of the previous temporal order into an extended present
came first with the discovery of a global simultaneity, which can be dated to
the Titanic catastrophe of 1912, of which - thanks to new means of com-
munication - people in various countries could read in the morning news-
papers. It was followed by the arrival of the timeless global culture of the
computer era. With the collapse of the old temporal order, as the past and
the future are replaced by an extended present, where instantaneous time
replaces linear time, memory seems to be unimportant. The acceleration of
change, with constant changes in work, life situations, social and material
conditions, makes memory of the previous generation irrelevant for younger
people. As more people participate simultaneously in more events, and as
more experience a faster pace and fluidity of time, people’s need for their
own private time and their desire to regain control over their time is also
growing. The consequences of constant change, striving for innovation, the
increasing pressure and speed of time lead to a call for the development of
new mechanisms of balance between novelty, repetition and the past.

This new paradoxical situation creates new challenges for sociology,
which now needs to reflect upon time in such a way as to see how ‘nature,
society and individuals are embedded in each other and are interdependent’
(Ellias 1992: 16). These challenges can be addressed by the conceptualiza-
tion of people as not only living in time, but also as having ‘an awareness of
the passing time which is incorporated in the nature of their social institu-
tions’ (Giddens 1981: 36), by placing them in relation to their representation
of the past and by seeing the self as articulated in time. It is here that collect-
ive memory proves most useful as it allows us to conceptualize the link
between groups and time in a fruitful way.

Memory and imagination: the meaning of the past

T told you the truth . . . Memory’s truth, because memory has
its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates,
minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its
own reality; it is a heterogeneous but usually coherent version of
events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s
version more than his own

(Rushdie 1980: 253)

For the Greeks, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was not only the
mother of history but also of poetry. The connection between memory and
poetry’s illuminative power of imagination has been appreciated by many

1 1 6 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

artists, and many of them express it explicitly. From the poet Simonides,
who is credited with the invention of the art of memory, to contemporary
writers of memoirs, this association between memory and imagination has
been perceived as central to telling a story. In an earlier form of memoir-
novel, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders, the conceit was
that the story told is true. Balzac and Flaubert still believed that they were
writing ‘history’, but by the late nineteenth century such conceit had become
convention and the genre of the novel proclaimed memory’s fictional nature.
Thus memory’s relationship to the notion of ‘truth’ or factual evidence had
become complex. Proust was interested in memory, not history, as he
assumed that memory gives reality to the past and that we construct the past
through an act of imagination. Another great twentieth-century master of
memory, Nabokov, asserted that it is an act of will and that ‘writing true
stories is the product of a fascinating struggle between imagination and
evidence’ (quoted in Modejska 2000: 6). C. Letty Fox, in her novel Her Luck
(1946), plays with the blurred line between memory and imagination:
‘I don’t know what imagination is, if not an unpruned tangled kind of
memory’ (quoted in Parks 2001: 90).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf still warned that
‘fact and fiction can’t go together’ (quoted in Modejska 2000: 5), but since
then the relationship between imagination and memory has become closer,
although less clear-cut. With new forms of writing blurring the lines between
memories and facts, between the clearly autobiographical and the strictly
fictional, memory and imagination seem to be intimately bound together. In
recent years it has become ‘fashionable to blur the distinction between
novels and history by emphasizing the fictional element in both of them’
(Ginzburg 1994: 388). Of particular relevance here are novels by Toni
Morrison (1990), who compares memory and fiction, and the work of A.S.
Byatt who concludes her exploration of the differences and similarities
between memory and fiction by saying: ‘We need to make images to try to
understand the relation of our images to our lives and death. That is where
art comes from’ (1998: 71). Flistorians adopting this approach (e.g. Natalie
Zemon Davis in her book Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their
Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (1987) combine literature and history.
Davis’ script for the film The Return of Martin Guerre is even closer to
fiction. On the other hand, some fiction is closer to history. For instance,
novelist Thomas Keneally, after historical research, wrote ‘a piece of non-
fiction which gets a prize for fiction’ (Burke 1998: 229) and which was made
into the film Schindler’s List.

This lack of separation between memory and imagination and history and
fiction is of course nothing new - Thucydides invented all the speeches in his
History of the Peloponnesian War, while Walter Scott’s great novels made
people wonder whether they were reading history or fiction. What is prob-
ably new today is the postmodernist writers’ claim that we cannot know the

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 117

past and therefore we may as well invent it (Byatt 2001). At the beginning of
the twenty-first century, with history gone, there is a view that writers
should explore the past using their imagination which can possess ‘the past
even if we can’t know the truth about it, even if the past did not exist except
in the form we choose to make it’ (Bayley 2001: 16). Moreover, now, when
readers are seen to be sophisticated enough ‘to hold several layers of reading
at once, and to enjoy the interplay between conceit, the fiction and the
authorial stake in the story told’, a new form of writing is emerging which
further clouds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction (Modejska
2000:26).

There is also no shortage of evidence for the connection between imagin-
ation and memory outside of literature. Philosophers - for example,
Spinoza, Montaigne and Pascal - have always been interested in the powers
of these two phenomena, and they often thought of memory in terms of
images. Hobbes thought that memory and imagination were the same in
essence, since both dealt with the absent or unreal, except for the fact that
‘memory supposeth time past, as fancy does not’ (quoted in Warnock 1987:
18). Hume, who recognized this difference, pointed out that ideas presented
by memory are much more lively and stronger than those presented by
imagination. Imagination, according to him, offers a great deal more free
play than memory because in memory our ideas are bound to occur to us
in the temporal and spatial order in which we actually experienced them
(Warnock 1987).

The argument that memory is the same as imagination was brought for-
ward by Giambattista Vico, a seventeenth-century scholar and teacher of
rhetoric. He argued that memory is virtually synonymous with imagination
because memory originates in the ontological act of creating images in order
to give meaning to the phenomena of the world (Hutton 1993: 34). Accord-
ing to Vico, memory has three different aspects: memoria (memory, when it
remembers things), fantasia (imagination, when it alters or imitates them),
and ingegno (invention, when it gives them a new turn or puts them into a
proper arrangement and relationship) (Price 1999: 13-16). Vico’s definition
of the threefold nature of memory suggests that a creative memory ‘makes’
the truth of the past by interpreting, altering and producing a coherent
version of events. Thus, Vico’s theory of memory, as ‘an act of interpretation
that enables us to establish connections between the familiar images of the
present and the unfamiliar ones of the past’ anticipated the modern science
of hermeneutics (Hutton 1993: 34).

In modern times, viewing historical interpretation as a task of reconstruct-
ing the collective mentalities of the past was carried further by Dilthey and
Heidegger. The most influential contemporary representative of this strand,
Gadamer, also shares Vico’s view of history as based on imaginative
reconstruction of the past. For Gadamer (1975) there is no uninterpreted
mode of experience, while life acquires its significance in so far as it is

1 1 8 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

interpretation, since to perceive is to interpret. In Gadamer’s hermeneutic
perspective, memory is conceptualized not as a kind of knowledge to which
images are not essential, but in terms of images. Bergson also suggested that
memory is virtual and enters the field of consciousness as an image, however
his theory is criticized by Sartre (1972), for whom memory is one way in
which we are conscious of reality.

For Sartre, any theory of imagination must satisfy two requirements: ‘It
must account for the spontaneous discrimination made by the mind between
images and its perceptions; and it must explain the role that images play in
the operation of thinking’ (1972: 117). Since there are three kinds of images
(of purely invented, past and anticipated things) memory and anticipation
are two different problems which are, moreover, radically different from the
problem of imagination. For Sartre, the main difference between imagin-
ation and memory is that imagination is about the unreal, while memory is
about the real, the past: ‘If I recall an incident of my past life, I do not
imagine it, I recall it’ (1972: 210). According to Sartre, memory is deter-
mined by the nature of reality itself and is on the side of perception, while
imagination is on the side of fiction. However, his effort to rule imagination
out of perception of all kinds, so that we can distinguish between memory
and imagination, is not totally successful as he finally realizes that we cannot
give a simple description of recalling without reference to images (Warnock
1976).

Generally, the relationship between memory and imagination is con-
ceptualized in two different ways. On the one hand, there is the hermeneutic
perspective of thinking about memory in terms of images and pointing to
narrative imagination as a principle of identity and memory. On the other
hand, there is a strand of thought which stresses the social reproduction of
memory and that tends to insist on the limited scope of our freedom in the
process of recall. According to the latter approach, memory is seen as a part
of patterned practices, which reduces the complexity and restricts the
uncertainty of our social environment. The past is seen to be known not
through imaginative stories but rather through the rationalization and the
conventionalization of experience: ‘Thus the memories of the majority of
people come to resemble increasingly the stereotype answers to a question-
naire, residence, educational degree, job, marriage, number and birthdays of
children, income, sickness and death’ (Schachtel 1982: 193). As mentioned
in the previous chapter, Bartlett (1932), who argued that people’s memories
reflect their groups’ standards and patterns of thinking, carried out a series
of psychological experiments in which people were given a brief but rather
ambiguous story to read and after a period of time were asked to recall it. As
they tried to remember the story, they engaged in ‘effort after meaning’ - i.e.
they rationalized its less intelligible aspects and reinterpreted it in light of
their world knowledge. Bartlett’s conclusion that people always justify their
statements by employing existing schematas and remember what ‘everybody

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 119

else remembers too’ suggests that it is not imagination but rather con-
ventional schematas that organize our remembering.

The importance of the process of rationalization rather than imagination
in our thinking about the past is particularly true in the case of collective
memory, whose higher level of articulation, necessary for its transmission,
makes it more schematized, conceptualized, simplified and conventional-
ized. While any individual’s memory also includes unarticulated experi-
ences, and is therefore highly complex, collective memory is more schematic
as images can be ‘transmitted socially only if they are conventionalized and
simplified; conventionalized, because the image has to be meaningful for
an entire group; simplified, because in order to be generally meaningful
and capable of transmission, the complexity of the image must be reduced’
(Fentress and Wickham 1992: 49). Yet, imagination is important because
the powers of memory and imagination are impossible to separate (as shown
by the systematic errors in our remembering which are evidence of memory’s
imaginative reconstruction) (Bartlett 1932: 213), and because there is
nothing in remembered images themselves that allows us to tell if they refer
to something real or imaginary (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 49).

Memory is the experience of the past mediated by representation, so it is
the construction of images that puts memories before our eyes and which
reveals what experience means. Although imagination is perhaps not essen-
tial to all types of memory (e.g. habitual memory, which incorporates
practical and usable knowledge of the world and does not rely on the
deployment of images), exploring something imaginatively requires mem-
ory (Warnock 1987: 76). Memory and imagination are interconnected
through their respective roles in assigning and reading meanings, as
memory is crucial to our ability to sustain a continuity of experience, and
this sense of continuity is essential for understanding the world, while our
imaginative thinking is based on our ability to make the world intelligible
and meaningful. It was Oretga y Gasset ([1926] 1960) who claimed that
modern people are empty because of their lack of memory, and since with-
out memory they cannot understand the present, they lack imagination
and an inner desire to excel. Also, Bauman (1982), who defines historical
memory as an acquired set of narratives embedded in everyday conscious-
ness, stresses that such historical narratives serve to make sense of the
present world. Thus, we need to cultivate both memory and imagination
because memory is central in the process of assigning meaning, which, in
turn, is necessary if we are to cope with today’s overabundance of images
and information.

Memory and imagination are also brought together in testimony ‘because
the witness says I was a part of the story, I was there’, while at the same time
they use their imagination to retell the story (Ricoeur 1999: 16). In testi-
mony, memory is recalled in such a way that others can imagine being there
- this imaginative narratization helps them to imagine a true experience.

1 20 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

However, when imagination reveals meanings of the past and makes the past
visible as if it were present, it sometimes resembles fiction more than histor-
ical narrative. Thus, in the final analysis, in our search for the truth or what
really happened, we rely on trust: ‘When I testify to something, I am asking
the others to trust what I am saying is true. To share testimony is to
exchange trust. Beyond this we cannot go. Most institutions rely funda-
mentally on the trust they place in the word of the other’ (Ricoeur 1999: 16).
Thus, while aiming to achieve a balance between imagination and an object-
ive and critical recall, we depend in the last instance on the trustworthiness
of others.

When discussing memory and imagination, therefore, we need to realize
not only that it is very difficult to separate them but also that we tend to
accept various shapes of their relationship in different genres and in different
contexts. Fact, fiction, memory and imagination, speculation and invention
are all parts of telling the story of the past, and this story will carry us
forward, will become the crucial condition of social harmonious coexist-
ence, only if it does not undermine social trust. The extension of trust in any
particular setting depends in part on ‘the actors’ reinterpreting their collect-
ive past in such a way that trusting cooperation comes to be a natural feature
of their common heritage’ (Sabel 1993: 107). Therefore, in order to ensure
such trust and avoid conflicts, there is a need for a critical evaluation of one’s
traditions, which can only be achieved if we fully understand the contested
nature of the past.

Contested memories

Because memory is a field of the articulation of public and private interests,
values and aspirations, it is also the site where contradictions of identities
are often contested. As memory discourse has established itself as the lan-
guage through which modern societies express their dilemmas and contro-
versies, battles over memory are not uncommon. Such controversies indicate
that past events have not yet ‘passed to history’ (Hartman 1986: 1) and
that memory is open, fluid and contestable. Arguments over memory are
frequently strengthened by reference to numerous remarks about the power
of remembrance which are abstract and ambiguous enough to become
rhetorical weapons. One of the most famous quotations is Orwell’s saying,
‘Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the
present controls the past’. A quote from Santayana, which says that those
who refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it, and the words of an
eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi, Ball Shem Tov, ‘The secret of redemption
is remembrance’, are often mentioned. The use of rhetorical arguments in
battles over memory is important because they tend to sharpen our know-
ledge of what should be remembered and acted upon, while at the same time

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 121

covering up the fact that memory is often lost to interests, politics and
emotions.

As monuments replace the real site of memory (Nora 1996a), they increas-
ingly provoke discussions which are interesting examples of contested mem-
ories. There is a restrictive relation between monuments and memory.
Monuments seeking to honour collective memory can be ‘forgetful’ of some
elements of the past (Young 2000). Whose vision of the past is ‘put into a
monument’ can be the result of protracted struggle and often has lasting
political implications. For example, one of the most publicized controversies
was a conflict over the form and content of Washington’s Vietnam War
memorial. Conflict arose when the official state authorities’ vision of the
monument, as a symbol of patriotism and glory of the nation, did not match
with ordinary people’s desire to commemorate pain, grief and suffering. The
clash of these two interests shows that ‘the shaping of a past worthy of
public monuments and commemoration is contested and involves a struggle
for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments’
(Bodnar 1992: 9)

Memory is also contested when different groups of people declare equally
passionate attachments to the same place, city, or site. Recently the con-
troversy between Poles and Jews over Auschwitz’s site provoked strong
reactions because Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp located in
Poland, is a sacred place for both involved groups. This controversy has also
attracted international attention because of its very sensitive nature and
moral implications. The site of Auschwitz camp, where German Nazis
murdered 1.6 million people, the vast majority being Jews (1.35 million)
from across Europe, has been the subject of continuous contention since the
mid-1980s. The controversy was sparked when a Carmelite convent
appropriated a camp building in 1984 and was further fueled by the erection
of more than 100 crosses on the site in the mid-1990s (although the first one
was placed at the site earlier, in 1979 to commemorate Pope John Paul’s visit
to Auschwitz). The Polish presentation of the site’s history has until
relatively recently tended to marginalize Jews - for example, the 1986
guidebook to the Auschwitz-Birekanu museum had nothing to say about
Jews at all! Thus, for Poles, Auschwitz has become a symbol of its nation’s
martyrdom, yet, as the largest Jewish cemetery, for Jews it is the most prom-
inent symbol of the Holocaust (Bartoszewski 1991). Consequently, the Poles
saw the nuns’ decision to locate convent near the martyrdom site as a means
of extending prayers for Poles killed at the camp, while the Jews saw it as a
sign of the Polish Catholic Church’s aspiration to impose its own symbols on
the site.

The first phase of the conflict involved numerous charges and counter
charges, and the involvement of both religious and political organizations
(including the Polish and Israeli governments) was only resolved by the
intervention of the Vatican, causing the nuns to leave the site (Rittner and

1 22 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Roth 1993). The end of communism, which ‘unfreezed’ Polish memory and
opened it to new voices and pressures, initially reignited the conflict over
how to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The unauthorized con-
struction of crosses by nationalistic and radical Catholics in an adjoining
field added fresh fuel to the controversy, as Jewish groups objected to them
and to the Church’s role as the guardian of the spirituality of the victims. As
the international demands for the protection of Auschwitz made the contro-
versy into a diplomatic incident, the Polish authorities again became
involved. Although in 1998 the Polish government lost its legal challenge to
take over the property where the crosses stood, they were all removed apart
from the original one. The debate about the ‘Papal Cross’ still continues, but
the conciliatory solution to this long-lasting controversy is now, due to the
more open and democratic nature of the Polish system, closer to a resolution
than ever before.

The convent controversy can be described as a conflict over who should
commemorate the victims of Auschwitz, and in what way. An example of a
battle over what actually happened in Auschwitz is the court confrontation
between David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt. Irving’s libel suit against
Penguin Books accused Lipstadt’s book, Denying the Holocaust (1993) of
falsely labelling him as a Holocaust denier, or revisionist. The suit was tried
in the British High Court in London from 1996 to 2000, where Irving
argued that his reputation as a historian had been harmed by the alleged
libellous words in Lipstadt’s book, which brands him as ‘one of the most
dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial’ and as somebody for whom
the problem with the gas chambers in Auschwitz was that they were ‘a myth
that would not die easily’(Lipstadt 1993: 181, 179).

In Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt examines deliberate misrepresenta-
tion and manipulation of historical evidence about Nazi crimes and argues
that, while Holocaust denial is not a new phenomenon, it has increased in
scope and intensity since the mid-1970s, and that one of the most essential
claims the deniers make is about the evidence of Auschwitz as a death camp.
Because Auschwitz has become central to Holocaust denial and since
Lipstadt had to prove the accuracy of the statements in her book, the
Auschwitz question played a central role in the court proceedings. An expert
witness analysed the historical evidence for the gas chambers at Auschwitz
and refuted revisionist claims to the contrary. The demolition of the argu-
ments of Holocaust deniers against Auschwitz resulted in a judgment that
destroyed Irving’s reputation as a historian and discredited Holocaust
revisionism. Lipstadt remarks in her book that if ‘Holocaust denial has
demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth and history’
(p. 216), yet her victory in court shows the importance of vital historical
documents. If there is a lesson for memory from the trial, it is that it ‘cannot
be validated as a historical source without being checked against “objective
evidence” ’ (Assmann 1997: 9).

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 123

The conflict between revisionists and Lipstadt illustrates the issue of
memory’s role as a source of historical truth, while the convent controversy
was a conflict over rights to symbolic representation of the past. Memory is
also a subject of dispute when sides in a conflict accuse each other of
exploitation and abuse of memory. At least three different arguments are put
forward in such battles over memory. First, it is argued that memory is
misused because it is assigned a sacred status. Novick’s protest against the
sacrilization of the Holocaust memory is a good illustration of such a stand.
Second, it is argued, (e.g. by Finkelstein in reference to Holocaust memory)
that memory is abused when it becomes an ideology. Third, the commercial
exploitation of memory, leading to its banalization and sentimentalization,
is perceived as lowering memory’s status and value.

Novick’s book, The Holocaust in American Life shows the evolution of
Jewish memory of the Holocaust and illustrates that changes in what we
remember depend upon political and sociocultural contexts. It presents
collective memory as always and inevitably grounded in current concerns,
understandings and needs and asserts that it is ‘in crucial senses ahistor-
ical, even anti-historical’ because it tends to simplify and does not allow
for sufficient and multiple perspectives (1999: 3-4). The book tells the
story of how in the aftermath of World War II the Holocaust was first
marginalized and not cast as a uniquely Jewish event, and then came to be
centred in American life. It asserts that current interest in the Holocaust
comes close to ‘fetishism’ or a ‘cult’ and that this process of sacrilization
establishes the Holocaust as a ‘mystery’ that cannot be explained and
comprehended. Fifty years after the war, the Holocaust has become ‘virtu-
ally the only common denominator of American Jewish identity’ (Novick
1999: 7).

Like Novick, Finkelstein (2000) also argues against the sacrilization of
memory by making it into a kind of ‘mystery religion’ and shows how mem-
ory, when it is used to serve some specific interest, can easily become indif-
ferent to historical facts and inner contradictions. Both writers also note
the reluctance of the American Jewish community of the 1950s to discuss
the Nazi extermination. However, Novick’s book is more balanced, while
Finkelstein’s approach is more schematic and polemical as he, in a rather
reductive way, accuses the American Jewish establishment of using the
Holocaust to defend Israel and uplift its own standing with American elites.
Thus Finkelstein asserts that the Holocaust is not merely a religion but an
ideology which serves a whole new industry. Building on, but going beyond,
the insight of Novick’s book, Finkelstein says that the Holocaust ‘has
proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon’ (2000: 3). According to
him, in the modern world when such notions as power, interest and ideology
are no longer used, ‘all that remains is the bland, depoliticized language of
“concerns” and “memory” ’ (2000: 5). Thus, the Holocaust memory is ‘an
ideological construct of vested interests’, exploited by organized American

1 24 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Jewry to deflect criticism of Israel and its own morally indefensible polices
(2000: 6, 149).

Opposition to the process of memory commercialization, trivialization
and banalization is behind the third type of contested memories. Following
again our Holocaust case study, we can illustrate this type of contested
memories with attempts to rescue the Holocaust memory from being com-
mercially and emotionally exploited by media and business. Fights against
publishers’ trivialization and exploitation of the topic in all possible con-
texts are instigated in order to preserve the integrity of the historical record.
Today’s overabundance of information about the Holocaust, it is argued,
can lead to the ‘banalization of the Holocaust’ rather than to a more pro-
found understanding of it (Silverman 1999: 38). The ‘Holocaust industry’,
‘the marketization of the Holocaust’ and ‘the Americanization of the Holo-
caust’, are seen as a danger, as these trends can condition the way we receive
any account of the destruction of European Jewry (Bartov 2000).

Yet, it is worth emphasizing that collective memory is not necessarily
manipulated and can be a source of historical truth. Even more importantly,
we should note that when memory functions as myth its evaluation from the
point of view of the historical truth is irrelevant. Thus, to understand why
contestations over memory take place and how such battles function in
national cultures, memory needs to be seen as being ‘located in a contested
terrain on which mythical and rational images of the past sometimes work
together and sometimes do battle, but these images always shape identity
and its transformation’ (Olick and Levy 1997: 934). This, in turn, can only
be developed, as this chapter has argued, if we comprehend the complexity
of the relationships between memory and history, memory and time and
memory and imagination.

To sum up, the discussion of the relationships between memory and his-
tory, memory and time, and memory and imagination showed the trans-
formation of these realtionships and their new-found openness, flexibility
and dynamic nature. Today, rather than insisting on an opposition between
memory and history, we are inclined to accept an interrelationship between
the two, and to rely upon both their methods of inquiry. At the same time,
we stress that our remembering of the past will not be confused with our
historical understanding of it. In addition, the acceleration of change, as
more and more people participate simultaneously in more and more events
and experience a faster pace of life, leads to an apparent increase in the speed
of time, which in turn reorganizes the relationship between time and
memory.

Because memory involves the construction of mental images to ‘place the
past before our eyes’, the interconnection between memory and imagination
was also discussed by looking at their respective roles in assigning and read-
ing meaning. It was argued that in order to achieve a balance between
imagination and objective, critical recall, we depend on the trustworthiness

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES 125

of others. In the final analysis, the result is the frequently contested nature of
the past.

Further reading

Adam, B. (1990) Time and Social Theory. Oxford: Polity Press.

Burke, P. (1989) History as social memory, in T. Butler (ed.) Memory: Culture and
the Mind, pp. 1-32. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Hutton, P. (1993) History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, VT: University Press of
New England.

Klein, K. (2000) On the emergence of memory in historical discourse, Representa-
tions, Winter: 127-53.

Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Nora, P. (1989) Between memory and history, Representations, 26 (Spring): 7-25.

CHAPTER 6

STUDYING MEMORY

‘Memory is a powerful tool in the quest for understanding, justice
and knoivledge. It raises consciousness. It heals some wounds,
restores dignity, and prompts uprisings’

(Hacking 1995: 3)

Memory has always been a large and multilayered field of study, increas-
ingly attracting researchers from various disciplines. The rapid expansion of
the notion of memory in scholarly discourse means, however, that it would
be impossible to survey the interest of all disciplines in any detail. Thus, in
what follows we will discuss only four fields of studying memory: investiga-
tions of commemorative actions, investigations of the links between mem-
ory and identity, studies of traumatic memory, and research on connections
between memory and justice.

Memory and commemorative activities

‘Commemoration is a way of claiming that the past has some-
thing to offer the present, be it a warning or a model’

(Olick 1999: 381)

The recent growth of research into commemorative practices has been an
international phenomenon. The surge of social scientists’ interest in com-
memorative rituals and ceremonies cannot be seen in isolation from the
major political upheavals of the late twentieth century, which have made the
issue of memory central to political discourse and practice. It has been
advanced by various international anniversaries and celebrations, with the
celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of World War II being the most

STUDYING MEMORY 127

important. As the rise of ‘the age of commemoration’, which can be attrib-
uted to the acceleration and democratization of history, has imposed on us
a ‘duty to remember’ (Nora 1996a: 3), war has proved to be one of the
most productive and compelling subjects in memory studies (Ashplant et al.
2000b: 6).

Commemoration celebrations are studied within many paradigms,
although since the publication of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The
Invention of Tradition (1983), which describes the constructed com-
memorative representations and rituals staged by the modern state, this
approach has been the most popular. Within this paradigm researchers have
been asking questions about the power of such commemorations to draw
upon war sacrifices and loss as a means of re-establishing social cohesion
and the legitimacy of authority. The popularity of this perspective is con-
nected with the fact that it still captures the main objectives of commemor-
ations, which always involve the construction or a unitary and coherent
version of the past that still provides comforting collective scripts capable of
replacing a lost sense of community. Furthermore, this type of investigation,
by focusing on the uses of the past in monuments, museums, theme parks,
historical films, textbooks, public oratory and other domains, highlights the
role played by the media in refashioning tradition and framing acts of com-
memoration. Finally, the approach is still seen as providing the relevant
theoretical framework for the exploration of commemorations and rituals
imposed by authoritarian regimes, which shows how this type of state
enforces a monolithic mode of war commemoration. Generally, the inven-
tion of tradition type of commemoration studies illustrates the significance
of rituals for solidarity and the acquisition of shared forms of seeing and
experiencing.

Flowever, in today’s democratic societies, with many new emancipatory
opportunities and expanded individual choices, it has become increasingly
difficult to construct a unified public memory. Thus, recent studies of com-
memoration, as they research different agencies’ and collectivities’ initiatives
and responses to past traumas, talk about a multiplicity of invented tradi-
tions or a plurality of memories. This second perspective studies various
groups and collectives of civil society, but not states. It sees commemoration
as a struggle or negotiation between competing narratives, and stresses that
the dynamic of commemorative rituals involves a constant tension between
creating, preserving and destroying memories. The shift from the presentist
perspective’s concern with the memory of war, as practiced by the state, to
the study of commemorative rituals as representations of war memories
within a national culture (and in particular cultural forms) has been accom-
panied by a growing interest in the exploration of personal memories of war.
Collective remembrance is conceptualized as ‘the product of individuals and
groups, who come together not at the behest of the state or any of its sub-
sidiary organizations, but because they have to speak out’ (Winter and Sivan

1 28 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

1999b: 9). Within this third approach to the study of commemoration and
war memory, commemoration is analysed as an attempt at mourning and an
effort to repair the psychological and physical damage of war.

Many recent works try to overcome the polarization between these three
theoretical perspectives, not least because it has had ‘a deleterious effect on
the study of war remembrance’ (Ashplant et al. 2000b: 9). They propose to
eliminate this division by recognizing the complexity of the relationships
between the various agencies, namely between ‘those of individual memory,
remembrance in civil society and national commemorative practices organ-
ized by the state’ (Ashplant et al. 2000b: 10). Instead of being preoccupied
with ‘unmasking’ the ways in which ideas and symbols of national identity
represent ideological forms designed to shore up the position of the domin-
ant class, social scientists’ contribution to the study of memory is now more
flexible and sensitive. Communities of memories are not seen as being
exclusively based on national principles, as rituals of commemoration for
AIDS victims, for example, illustrate (Sturken 1997). The ability to differen-
tiate between the memory of various groups (e.g. national memory, class
memory, individual memory) brings Halbwachs’ theories back into the main-
stream of sociological debate. Such new investigations of memory, sup-
plemented with analyses of individual mourning and personal memory, have
been further enhanced by inspirations coming from the work of Nora’s team
which shows the plurality of meanings and uses involved. This group’s
argument, that specific places of memory do not simply arise out of lived
experience but instead have to be created, has been tested in investigations of
how various nations resort to commemorative practices in order to give
symbolic meaning to their past.

Studies of war have been contributing to our understanding of the
traumas of military conflicts for a long time. This type of inquiry provides us
with well documented evidence that the public memory of war has under-
gone significant modification in the last two centuries. From the pioneering
work of Paul Fussel’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Mosse’s
Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990), Jay
Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), through War and
Memory in the Tiventieth Century (1997) edited by Martin Evans and Ken
Lunn, to European Memories of the Second World War (1999) edited by
Peitsch, Burdett and Gorrara, many writers have analysed how wars have
been inscribed in their respective societies’ memory and culture. They
explore the ways in which the search for a language of mourning went on
during and after both world wars and how the imagery of war entered art,
film, literature and poetry. They show how nations, due to massive losses in
the two world wars, not only resorted to erecting so-called tombs of
unknown soldiers, but also focused on mass mortality and mass suffering in
their art. We learn from such studies that war, even in victorious states, was
not represented in glorious terms. Memory of this terrible period was

STUDYING MEMORY 129

reflected in apocalyptic themes in prose and in a poetic language of com-
munication about or with the dead (Winter 1995). Works such as War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Winter and Sivan 1999a), look at
how war has been remembered by various groups, from soldiers to the
mothers of the dead, and Sherman’s (1999) The Construction of Memory in
Interwar France, or the collection edited by Ashplant et al. (2000a), called
The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, describe the ways in
which communities respond to the unprecedented traumas of war.

The growing number of publications also focuses on the issue of the his-
tory and politics of commemoration. As images of past wars are constantly
reproduced, revised and replaced, many studies ‘trace the history of the
representations of the past over time’ (Olick 1999). This type of work illus-
trates the expansion of commemorative practices, their process of democra-
tization and the conflicts and politics behind those practices, as well as their
evolution. Such work shows how the state’s interest in giving collective
bereavement some concrete political meaning, together with public pressure
for its acknowledgment, has resulted in the construction of war memorials
and the development of new commemorative practices. For example, the
spread of World War I monuments in France is attributed both to towns and
villages’ sense of loss and need to leave traces of all their dead, as well as to
the state’s interest in signifying national unity through commemorative
activities and sites (Laqueur 1994; Sherman 1994). In his book, which
shows how the French commemorations were actively shaped by this coun-
try’s social and political life, Sherman (1999) provides evidence of how
debated and contested the issue of how to remember was in the interwar
period. Viewing the construction of memory as a social and political
process, Sherman explores the types of experience contributing to French
memories of World War I, such as war narratives, tourism and visual
imagery, analyses what kinds of ‘contestation’ the commemoration pro-
duced, and how commemoration simultaneously reinforced and questioned
existing distinctions within French society.

Much research in this area is interested in the meaning of war memorials.
Noticing changes in the way wars are remembered and in the interpretation
of monuments, various authors argue that the meaning of monuments is not
fixed because ‘like memory’ it is profoundly unstable (Sherman 1994: 206).
This will continue to be contested because commemorative practices operate
within larger political and economic structures which mould the condition
of a practice and mediate both the experience and the representation of
memory (Evans and Lunn 1997). Discussions of the transformation of
memorials to unknown soldiers illustrate the shift in the meaning of war
memorials from justifying death and war to demonstrating, after World War
II, the imperative ‘Never again’ (Koselleck 2001). Studies of the history of
memorials and commemoration not only document war memories, but also
decode ways in which the remembrance of wars has assisted the emergence

1 30 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

of a rhetoric of national identity. For instance, Inglis’ (2002) study of war
memorials in Australia demonstrates how public rituals of mourning estab-
lished the cult of the Great War at the heart of the Australian identity. Such
investigations additionally examine which groups are acknowledged and
which are not visible in national celebrations. For example, Koshar’s (1994)
presentation of the evolution of German remembrance of the Nazi period
shows how different political interests shaped Germany’s collective memory
of World War II. Similarly, Savage (1994: 141) describes American Civil
War memorials as being ‘ultimately a story of systematic cultural repression,
carried out in the guise of reconciliation and harmony’.

After World War II the nature of commemorative practices changed,
becoming more democratic and local as well as less prone to manipulation
by nationalist leaders (Mosse 1990; Young 1993; Gillis 1994b; Koonz
1994). An important point in the history of public commemoration, and not
only in the USA, was the 1980s controversy surrounding the Vietnam
memorial, which is commonly seen as ‘a decisive departure from the
anonymity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a growing acknow-
ledgment that everyone now deserves equal recognition’ (Gillis 1994b: 13).
This, together with the proliferation in the 1990s of anniversaries, memorial
services and ethnic celebrations, as well as the growing number of diverse
and competing interest groups seeking to use constructions of the past to
advance their agenda in the present, has established a new way of explaining
commemorative practices, now seen as emerging from ‘the intersection of
official and vernacular cultural expressions’ (Bodnar 1994: 75). This type of
study, when arguing that beneath official memories, fashioned by the dom-
inant discourse there are alternative memories, often invokes Foucault’s
(1977) notion of counter-memory, which illuminates the connection
between the hegemonic order and historical representations.

Collective memory is conceptualized in a similar manner in cultural
studies, which over the last two decades has expanded our perception of the
past by analysing various ways and media through which remembering
occurs in the public sphere. Memory, from this point of view, is defined as
being at least to some degree independent from dominant structures or even
as a counter-culture in itself, capable of resisting the dominant order. Here,
cultural attempts to remember events that seem to defy the official represen-
tation are areas of particular scrutiny. By subjecting the process of pro-
ducing sites of memory to critical analysis, researchers explore the forms
cultural production takes in the dual context of the commercial manage-
ment of public memory by the state and the increased articulation of
memory by various agencies from within civil society. This type of research
often conceptualizes collective memory as cultural memory, as it is argued
that we are currently in a phase of transition from ‘communicative memory’
(or the memory of people who have first-hand knowledge of events) to
‘cultural memory’, in which memory becomes institutionalized through

STUDYING MEMORY I 3 I

cultural means, such as commemorative rituals, memorials and museums
(Assmann 1995).

This shift toward the study of cultural memory manifests itself in con-
temporary debates about modes of representation of war, where discussions
of the aesthetic forms of commemoration introduce alternative understand-
ings of war. Using the term ‘cultural memory’ opens the inquiry to the ques-
tion of how popular culture has produced memories of wars and other
catastrophes and disasters. The first wave of popular commemorative stud-
ies focused on the institutions of public remembering formed around the
nexus of some physical memorial or commemorative. It showed a deep
ambivalence in modern societies with respect to their attitudes towards the
past (Sider and Smith 1997: 8). The second wave examined how films and
TV images, photographs and advertisements, songs, theatres, museums,
exhibits, tourist spots, fictions, school curricula and political speeches have
shaped memory and commemorative activities, seen as important vectors of
personal, local and national identity. In other words, cultural memories are
studied as a reservoir of images which are socially and politically mediated
as well as historically and culturally embedded.

Numerous examples of such studies suggest that there is an increasing
interest in exploring how media and aesthetic forms question national
narratives. Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995) surveys
modernist genres of commemoration as adopted by survivors during the
interwar period. Discussion of postwar films from different countries shows
that these created ‘spaces for the representation of otherwise hidden dimen-
sions’ (Ashplant et al. 2000a: 37). Sturken (1997), while examining how
cultural memories of the Vietnam War are produced through objects, images
and representations, explores how cultural memory can form an arena of
resistance to dominant forms of national culture. Rejecting the assumption
that the mass media reprogramme memory by representing the values of the
dominant social formation, this orientation sees cultural memory as shaped
and mediated by many factors, with the media being only one of them.

Some researchers in cultural studies conceptualize cultural memory as
coming close to being an ideology or a form of collective (often false) con-
sciousness, a position in which remembering is merely a political tool. Yet,
many of those writing in this field are interested in commemorative symbols
that do not necessarily invoke a sense of identity with those remembered.
Moreover they view memorial sites as competing for our attention rather
than for our memory and investigate the largely discursive ‘work’ that goes
into the production of sites of memory (Katiel 1999: 103). This new
approach is well illustrated by Sandage’s (1993) study which shows how
African-American civil rights groups appropriated the Lincoln Memorial to
bring their demands to public attention. Such studies also observe that
commemoration images often express neither the past nor the present
but changing interactions between past and present: ‘Past meanings are

1 32 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

malleable to varying degrees, and present circumstances exploit these poten-
tials more or less’ (Olick 1999: 381). In other words, the complex reflexivity
of commemoration can only be grasped by adopting a dialogical model. The
study of the history, politics and memory of West German commemoration
of the anniversary of 8 May 1945 allows Olick to explain the differences
between commemorations not only as a function of the history to which
they refer or the politics of the present, but also as shaped by the forms and
media available at different moments. Seeing commemoration as ‘an
ongoing dynamic process involving social and political contexts and genres
of memories’ provides an interesting model for further studies.

Finally, turning to the most recent development in commemoration
studies, we should notice the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union,
which resulted in a proliferation of investigations that examine ‘organized
forgetting’, characteristic of state-sponsored representations of the past
(Wanner 1998; Wingfield 2000), counter-memories, which survived despite
official propaganda (Irwin-Zarecka 1994; Mason 2000), or new hybrid
forms of identity emerging in the postcommunist era (Berdahl 1999). Studies
looking at the Balkan region point to a connection between the eruption of
identities constructed in conflict and violence and identities rooted in the
claim to a common past (Jedlecki 1999). These investigations illustrate that
as overarching structures such as nation state and ideology are further
eroded, the past acquires new significance and meaning in terms of a
ruptured and tragic present. Hence, memory and commemorative activities
become more important as sources of individual and collective identity.

Memory and identity

‘We choose to center certain memories because they seem to us
to express what are central to our collective identity. Those
memories, once brought to the fore, reinforce that form of
identity’

(Novick 1999:5)

Identity is a key word of contemporary society. People use it to make sense
of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with others and how
they differ from them. It is also used by politicians to persuade people to
understand themselves, their interests and predicaments, as well as to per-
suade them that they are ‘identical’ with one another. Social cognition and
symbolic interaction, two prevalent perspectives in social psychology,
provide the theoretical underpinning of the traditional understanding of
identity. In the past few decades, the concept of identity has been taken up
more broadly, both within sociology and in other disciplines. Many recent
social theorists have extended the concept of identity to include social iden-

STUDYING MEMORY 133

tity, which is defined by the extent to which individuals identify themselves
in terms of group membership (Cerulo 1997). Collective identities are seen
as implying notions of group boundedness and homogeneity, and an
emotional sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded group, involving
both a felt solidarity with fellow group members and a felt difference from
outsiders.

Today, memory is widely called upon to legitimate identity because the
core meaning of any individual or group identity is seen as sustained by
remembering. Memory, as a collective belief in some vision of the past as
being ‘the true’ one in a specific moment of the group’s life, is assumed to be
the essential anchor of particularistic identities. Social memory, according to
this perspective, is an expression of collective experience which ‘identifies a
group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future’
(Fentress and Wickham 1992: 25). Thus memory, when ‘organized into
patterns so that they make some kind of continuing sense in an everchanging
present’ (Young 1988: 98), becomes the main source of a group or a per-
sonal identity. Moreover, memory and identity depend upon each other
since not only is identity rooted in memory but also what is remembered is
defined by the assumed identity (Gillis 1994b: 3).

The idea that identity is rooted in the persistence of the subject through
time is a very old one. Both philosophy and psychology claim that memory is
a highly important element in the account of what it is to be a person
(Warnock 1987). It was John Locke who posed the classical philosophical
problem of identity by claiming that it is consciousness and remembering
that make us who we are. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
( [1690J 1975) Locke sees memory as the criterion of personal identity, and
equates it with a collection of experiences which are laid away for later
retrieval in their original form. He asserts that one’s identity is constituted
by one’s psychological continuity: I am what I remember. For Locke, per-
sons were primarily legal subjects who were responsible for their past
actions, not merely because they could remember them but because in
remembering them they identified themselves with the persons who per-
formed them. So, an individual remains the same person over time for as
long as they are able to summon into consciousness events from their past.

Memory’s links with identity were also a frequent topic of nineteenth-
century novels, while in sociology it is commonly assumed that telling
stories about our past and making sense of that past is the main source of the
self (Giddens 1991). Among the many modern political discourses which
seek to establish the sameness and continuity of a group across time by
referring to the role of the past in the construction of political identities,
nationalism, liberalism and constitutional patriotism are the most popular
(Booth 1999). Nationalism, which sees identity as rooted in some notion of
shared traits (ethnicity, culture, religion, language), argues that nations, as
communities of memory, protect remembrance of the past and use memory

1 34 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

as a political instrument. For liberals, who contend that political life does
not need to be rooted in a shared past and common experience, only a
narrow band of continuity and shared common memory is needed. Consti-
tutional patriotism, which occupies a middle position, seeks a reconciliation
between the universalist demands of liberal principles and the need for a
robust political identity, including a shared history (Habermas 1996).

The relationship between memory and identity is historical, with groups’
identities and their memories being social and political constructs. At earlier
historical moments, identity was not so much an issue; when societies were
more stable, identity was to a great extent assigned, rather than selected or
adopted. However, recently the nature of the links between identity and
memory has become more problematized with the decline in theoretical and
practical importance of theological and religious assumptions as stable
sources of identity (Taylor 1989). Now, identity is seen as the product of
multiple and competing discourses, and is thus unstable, multiple, fluctuat-
ing and fragmentary. The postmodern conception of identities as fluid,
multidimensional and personalized constructions, together with the politics
of identity, seen as a central aspect of postmodern politics and communities
in which the legitimization of a unitary identity or an overarching sense of
self has diminished, has highlighted the links between memory and identity.
When groups based on the previously private identities of citizens (race,
ethnicity, sexual preferences) compete for public recognition and legitimiza-
tion, their claims are rooted in their common memory of suffering, victim-
ization or exclusion. The dilemma of a post-national, post-traditional
political identity is connected with the tension between the vision of a
‘rational identity’ centred around universal norms and an identity laden
with the responsibility of remembrance, the legacy of the past. This friction
between openness and diversity (an imperative placed on the agenda by
immigration) on the one hand and the ethics of remembering and responsi-
bility on the other is indicative of the most important dynamic of modernity.
As the emphasis on individual choice and cultural identities grows, the
tension between the particularism of ‘realms of memory’ and the openness
of the universal democratic has become the focus of much new research.

This type of research illustrates that the openness of modern identity to
critical revision, coupled with increased pluralism and the separation
of national identity and political membership, means that particularistic
differences and pluralistic memories have gained in importance. On the
other hand, these investigations also show that, as the contemporary world
evolves in the direction of greater homogeneity and uniformity (with the
new role of media and globalization), this evolution not only strikes a blow
at traditional identities but also increases the need for some kind of belong-
ing. In other words, modern trends have both problematized identity and
created a desire, as well as a space, for a new search for identity (Touriane
2000 ).

STUDYING MEMORY 135

The conjunction of these two conditions - the need for collective identity
and the destruction of traditional identities - is an additional factor respon-
sible in part for the new cult of memory. Thus, ‘the memory craze and
uncertainty concerning identity go together’ (Megill 1999: 43). We witness
the growing plurality of memory seen as a stabilizer of and justification for
the self-designation that people claim (Terdiman 1993). The statement ‘I am
an A’ is now supplemented with: ‘I have always been an A’. Here the mem-
ory of having ‘always been an A’ serves as a support for identity that might
otherwise be seen as insufficiently justified (Megill 1999). This new link
between memory and identity, seen as ‘a sacred object, an “ultimate con-
cern”, worth fighting and even dying for’ (Gillis 1994b: 4), has granted a
new status to memory. Additionally, the increasing diversification and
fragmentation of social interests in contemporary societies, together with
globalization, migrations and demographic shifts, have provided the basis
for a new politics of identity. The growing importance of the politics of
identity, both as a defensive reaction against globalization and a prolonga-
tion of communal resistance (Castells 1997), has further enhanced the status
of memory, now seen as ‘an authentic mode of discourse among people of
color’ (Klein 2000: 138). As struggles for minority rights are organized
around questions of memory, debates over the notion of identity, often
employing the language of memory become increasingly politicized
(Huyssen 1995: 4-5).

Today, despite the fact that the past seems to be lending dignity to the
identity of many groups, a common past is more about the duty to remem-
ber rather than real memories. For example, being Jewish increasingly
means only ‘to remember being Jewish’ (Nora 1996a: 12). With the decline
of living memory, identity ceases to be based on a shared experience of past
events and is, instead rooted in a common heritage which ‘distills the past
into icons of identity, bonding us with procurers and progenitors, with our
own earlier selves, and with our promised successors’ (Lowenthal 1994: 43).
In the shift from memory to heritage, certain aspects of the group past will
be prioritized over others, ‘sometimes leading to a sanitized or romanticized
vision of the past’ (Noakes 1997: 93). The self-congratulatory nature of the
relationship between identity and heritage is often criticized for bland
emptiness and escapist nostalgia. Since the further one moves from the past,
the less one recalls its power dimension (Halbwachs [1941J 1992), heritage
often offers sentimentalized and romanticized sources of identity. Yet heri-
tage is closely connected with our need for a sense of the past, belonging and
identity, and therefore can also be seen as a creative act, one in which we
learn from each other’s efforts and experiences (Towenthal 1994: 43).

There are many important case studies concerning the connection
between memory and particular national identities (e.g. Maier 1988; Russo
1991). One of the most interesting is Lyn Spillman’s (1997) comparative
study of the celebrations of national centennials and bicentennials in

1 36 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Australia and the USA. Illustrating the process of creating national identities
in both countries in the late nineteenth century and 100 years later, Spillman
examines how the USA and Australia adapted to changes in their political
situations. She argues, following Benedict Anderson, that a sense of shared
experience through time is an important dimension of national identity and
that this sense of past, progress and future is an important feature of
imagined national community: ‘When people in both countries imagined
shared qualities which bound their communities, they also thought fre-
quently of their political values and institutions and prosperity’ (1997: 82).
Moving away from the dominant ideology thesis, Spillman assumes that
there are many possible alternatives for a version of the past and a vision of
the future which people develop to represent the nation and its unity. While
demonstrating that contemporary Australians and Americans articulate
their identities through symbols of egalitarian democracy, she suggests that
behind the different possibilities in which a nation might be ‘imagined’ lies ‘a
cultural process of great complexity, contingency and specificity’ (1997:
150). Spillman’s analysis reveals that the process of identity formation is
illuminated if we examine symbolic repertoires, cultural production in the
dynamics of centre/periphery relations, and the discursive field within which
national identities are constructed.

The issue of the link between memory and particular national identities
has been further problematized by the emergence of new postcommunist
states. Wanner, in her book Burden of Dreams (1998), asks how, given the
hybrid forms of identity created by the Soviet regime, does a new postcom-
munist Ukraine forge a sense of nationality? She looks at ‘the representation
of historical events as embedded in a process of identity reformation where
power relations and the ability of various groups to advance their interest is
revealed’ (Wanner 1998: 32). One of the most powerful legacies of the past
is the memory of the Chernobyl accident as it symbolizes the exploitative
nature of the system and the victimization of Ukraine under the Soviet
regime. As the Chernobyl memory reveals contestation and competing cul-
tural claims, and thus actualizes the past in the present, Wanner asserts that
the present acquires meaning only in terms of a ruptured and tragic past.

Studies of ethnic memories have been even more popular, which can be
explained by the wide acceptance of memory as a means of the legitimiza-
tion of group identity, by the growing problematization and fragmentation
of national identities as well as by the acknowledgment that respect for the
Other implies acceptance of ‘difference of memory’ (Ricoeur 1999: 12-16).
Many contemporary studies of ethnic identities cast ethnicity as fluid and
ethnic boundaries as continually changing. The issue of race and ethnicity is
also frequently discussed through the examination of collective memory,
which ‘often becomes a form of mourning and a paradoxical sign of loss’
(Weissberg 1999: 22). In one such study, Comaroff and Stern (1994) argue
that ethnic consciousness can be viewed as a universal potentiality that is

STUDYING MEMORY 137

objectified as a political identity when a population recognizes a common
threat. In this process of crafting political identities, individual memories are
shaped by representations of the past in the public sphere, which take on
various forms in response to specific circumstances.

In another study of the link between memory and collective identity,
Fortier (2000) investigates identity formation among Italian migrants in
Britain. She traces the identity narratives through which migrants’ identities
are constructed and stabilized, and describes written histories, politics of
identity and popular religion as three areas where Italians create a new
cultural identity grounded in memory. Living in diaspora brings liberation
from the necessary rootedness of origins in a single territory, or a single
place, and it means that identities are shaped from remembrance and un-
forgetting. Thus, the investigation of diaspora, which places the meaning of
‘home’, ‘origins’ and ‘tradition’ in the context of migration, and where
memories ‘may be place based’, yet are not ‘necessarily place bound’ (Fortier
2000: 159), assumes that the project of identity formation is a practice of
remembering places. Fortier, following Connerton’s (1989) assertion that
collective forms of remembrance are performative, assumes that performa-
tive memory is essential for groups’ identity. For example, the commemor-
ations and rituals at St Peter’s Italian church in London are presented as
deeply performative, thus enhancing the cohesion and identity of the Italian
migrant community: ‘Activities at St Peter’s are essentially about remember-
ing; the formation of individual and collective bodies, which are called upon
to inhabit the church and its surroundings’ (Fortier 2000: 13).

There are also many case studies of the connections between memory
and the identities of various social groups which show the construction of
collective identities, as constituted through shared memories, as always
involving groups defining themselves against their respective others
(whether elders in the case of generational groups or employers in the case of
employees). Groups have different criteria for judging the importance of
past events, as well as different conceptions of time and of legitimization.
Yet, in all collectivities’ recollections of their respective past, the group is
always positioned in relation to the outside world. Such memory is the most
effective recourse any social group has to reinforce its social identity with
regard to that of others. For example, Fentress and Wickham’s (1992) exam-
ination of how working-class communities remember the past leads them to
conclude that these communities (e.g. British mining communities) use the
heroic imagery of a strike, whether won or lost, as a representation of
community identity in opposition to the outside world.

In the 1990s, concern with memory went far beyond the studies of
working-class or national identities. With memories occupying the fore-
ground in identity debates over gender, sexuality and race, and with a new
pressure on social and cultural memory, public debates about identities have
now become intensely political. The new relationship between identity,

1 38 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

memory and politics means that a notion of identity which is ‘often shaped
by defensiveness or victimology, clashes with the conviction that identities,
national or otherwise, are always heterogeneous and in need of such hetero-
geneity to remain viable politically and existentially’ (Huyssen 1995: 5). In
other words, the preoccupation with memory as a basis for collective iden-
tity could lead to dangerous consequences, as the bloody conflicts between
different groups across Europe attest. The ethical burden brought by the
acceptance of the past in political identity results in many ambiguities and in
difficulties of weighing claims that cannot be objectively balanced. Recent
developments, such as conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, suggest that there
is a short passage from the passions of identity politics to vengeance
and vindictiveness (Melling 1997). According to Umberto Eco (quoted in
Melling 1997: 259), ‘ghosts of particularism’ in a new invigorated ‘cult of
tradition’ that sprang up as a source of hope for ethnic and national com-
munities in the 1990s may now bring new conflicts. Groups that turn
towards their past in order to glorify specific aspects of it use memory to
foster pride in some of their communal traditions and to demand a recogni-
tion of suffering. When memory becomes the basis of ‘the collective narcis-
sism of minor differences’ (Block 1998: 33), defenders of such groups’
uniqueness almost inevitably develop hostile attitudes towards each other,
and this can run a danger of allowing memory to be used as a political
instrument that legitimizes nationalist myths and propaganda. Thus, some
writers have warned that remembrance which is not accompanied by know-
ledge and thought is emptied of all responsibility and may endanger others
(Megill 1999).

Even more importantly, today’s fascination with memory may undermine
liberal universalism because the reliance on memory to legitimate collective
identity can question the universalistic principle. In addition, as argued by
Maier (1993), it can act as an obstacle to democracy because focusing such
group memories on narrow ethnicity may result in groups competing for the
recognition of suffering, thus undermining the democratic spirit of co-
operation. Such conflicts can, likewise, harm the advancement of a par-
ticular group’s interest because the systematic neglect of causes of group
disadvantage other than distinctive memory may result in a group suffering
material deprivation, lack of education opportunities or discrimination

(Barry 2001: 5, 305).

To sum up, while until recently it was assumed that it is history which
provides groups with their identity, ‘just as memory does for an individual’
(Arnold 2000: 118), today various groups rely on their collective memory to
claim their group identity. The current popularity of memory studies, and
their acceptance into the history project, is based on the assumption that ‘to
rob us of memory is to destroy a part of us, something essential to who we
are, something arguably as crucial to our identity as our physical person’
(Booth 1999: 258). In other words, memory has established itself as a

STUDYING MEMORY 1 39

category of academic discourse and political rhetoric due to its growing
acceptance as a criterion of authenticity of the self. However, scholars also
turn to memory for a different reason. With the growing recognition that
tragic past events, like the Holocaust, ‘may defy any historical explanation’
(Weissberg 1999: 12), witnesses’ memories are appreciated for their
explanatory power.

Memory and trauma

Traumas, representing the extremities of human experience, are the occa-
sions on which collective identities are most intensively engaged. Therefore,
memories of trauma are of interest to researchers of culture and society as
well as of the individual psyche. Studies of trauma memories owe a great
deal to medical discourse and psychoanalysis, although they are not just
psychologically oriented. Many of these works analyse the cultural shaping
of trauma memories or study culturally institutionalized memories of past
traumas. The growing visibility of studies of trauma can be seen as a result
of postmodernist theory’s fascination with psychoanalysis and its interest in
cultural studies. Both these factors have helped to establish memory as a
therapeutic discourse which provides an authentic link to the past (Klein
2000: 138-40).

At the end of the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis started ‘not with
memory but with forgetting’ (Mitchell 1998: 100). This interest in the
absence of memory, combined with the prevailing explanation of mental
problems, particularly hysteria, as being related to an earlier trauma,
resulted in the assumption that painful experiences are constituted as
repressed memories. The conflictual disturbance caused by repressed
memories was seen as responsible for a patient’s mental problems. Trauma
came into focus again during World War I, when shell-shocked men pro-
duced the same symptoms as hysterics. In 1980, as the numbers of veterans
of the Vietnam War diagnosed with psychological problems kept growing,
the American Psychiatric Association established a new diagnostic category,
called post-traumatic stress disorder (Prager 1998: 127). From the early
1990s the Recovered Memory Movement, popular mainly in the USA, has
claimed that ‘true’ recollection of memory requires outside intervention
to overcome an individual’s tendency to repress traumatic experiences
(Mitchell 1998). As the number of recovered memories of childhood abuse
brought to the courtroom increase, the controversy over ‘repressed memory
syndrome’ continues to grow. It is now evident that many cases of ‘repressed
memories’ uncovered during therapy were inaccurate and were in fact ideas
influenced by the movement’s main message.

Trauma entered psychoanalysis and psychology via medicine, where it
meant wounds, and later travelled from psychology to physiology (Hacking

1 40 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

1996;Young 1996). However, the most significant role in the history of the
conceptualization of trauma has been played by psychoanalysis, which was
developed by Freud as a way of curing troubled minds by recovering
suppressed memories. His notion of the unconscious as a repository of
repressed memories has shaped trauma studies by introducing the idea that
it is precisely what cannot be remembered that is decisive for the subject
(Hacking 1995). Freud, by defining sickness as a particular kind of failure of
memory, made memory a clue to the human condition. However, for him
memory is ‘not a passive receiver whose performance can be measured quan-
titatively; it embodies a moral choice, a sequence of acceptance and rejec-
tion’ (Rieff 1979: 38). Arguing that much of a person’s traumatic past is
shielded by amnesia, Freud suggests that such repression involves active
forgetting of threatening memories by pushing them into the unconscious.
Moreover, repressed memories, unlike forgotten ones, can acquire danger-
ous power over the personality, as partial leakage of painful memories can
lead to neurosis.

Freud asserts that the events of a person’s life are all recorded somewhere
in the mind, ready to be accessed if only the memories can be released from
repression. The observation of connections between hysterical symptoms
and various cases of repressed memory related to childhood traumas led
Freud to formulate the therapeutic aim of the science of psychoanalysis as
the interpretation of memory, seen as constituting the essential link between
two realms of psyche: its unconscious and conscious side. Memories are to
be analysed for their associations, seen as displacements or defences
constructed by the unconscious mind which performs the function of the
guardian of memory. However, even memory fragments transmitted to the
conscious mind are not transparent representations of past realities: ‘They
always surface in disguise. Revised and distorted by the psyche’s conflicting
needs, they are consciously rendered as a composite of truth and fiction’
(Hutton 1993: 64). ‘Screen memories’ block access to more disturbing
memories, and since they are not ‘recollections of actual events, but
reconstructions of those memories through the grid of contemporary feel-
ings’ (Isbister 1985: 130) the operation of our memories does not depend
exclusively on past events, but also on present interpretations of those
events.

Because of its attempts to cure traumatized people, psychoanalysis is
essentially a technique of retrieving lost memories through ‘memory and
mourning which work together in the fight for the acceptance of memories
and reconciliation’ (Ricoeur 1999: 12-14). According to this psychoanalytic
approach, the work of memory should not be separated from that of grief. If
psychoanalysis is an art of memory, as both Terdiman (1993) and Hutton
(1993) argue, it reveals a reverse mnemonic since it is concerned with forget-
ting rather than remembering, and with the unconscious mind rather than
conscious psychical intent. In other words, screen memories, as mnemonic

STUDYING MEMORY 141

images that displace hidden memories, protect us from traumatic experi-
ences: ‘As an art of memory, therefore, Freud’s psychoanalysis employs a
technique for deciphering the unconscious intentions encoded in screen
memories’ (Hutton 1993: 68). Freud’s focus on forgetting, or the selective
omission of events, as an example of the reconstructive labour of memory, is
in some respects similar to Halbwachs’ emphasis on the normative nature of
collective memory, seen as biased towards a positive image of the past
(Igartua and Paez 1997). Because of the normative nature of collective
memory aimed at defending a group identity, a common response to a trau-
matic past is silence and inhibition. Studies suggest that forgetting and
silence is a very frequent reaction as groups organize forgetting, reconstruc-
tion and positive distortion of the past in order to defend group values and
their own image (Frijda 1997; Paez et al. 1997).

Trauma studies have become central within both the humanities and the
politics of social movements. In these fields, Freud’s notion of ‘memory
work’ and his idea of mourning as a form of ‘working through’ which is
necessary in the process of acceptance of traumatic memories are concep-
tualized as types of reconciliation with the loss of objects of love. According
to the culturalist version of psychoanalysis, nations - like individuals - must
work through grief and trauma. Giving voice to one’s traumatic past and
recognizing it as part of one’s history is a necessary step in escaping from
patterns of suffering. Cultural studies’ interest in trauma has been further
advanced by its attraction to the concept of melancholia, a form of mourn-
ing where the loss is continually revisited. By investigating changes in the
rhetoric of loss, the role of mourning and the transformation of the vocabu-
lary of mourning, such studies testify to the importance of expressing grief in
the process of recovery and the struggle to retain human decency (Damousi
2002). This confirms Benjamin’s suggestion that we should not try to avoid
returning to past traumas as people can only prevent the ‘violence of
amnesia’ by conducting themselves like ‘a man digging’ who ‘must not be
afraid to return again and again to the same matter’ or to the same ‘buried
past’ (quoted in Sherman 1999: 229).

Trauma theories’ consonance ‘with a linear, historical model of temporal-
ity’ and their ‘prioritization of the event in their understandings of memory
formation’ offer us the possibility of overcoming a memory/history oppos-
ition (Radstone 2000: 89). Such studies of memories of trauma examine
links between the inner world of memory and the external world of histor-
ical events by focusing on the experience of pain. By placing trauma at the
heart of memory, these investigations view the body as an important ‘site’
of memory and therefore question the traditionally privileged position of
vision in recalling the past. In other words, they concentrate on corporeal
memory, which is memory ‘inscribed into body in the form of permanent
traces which structure, in response to certain perceptions, the repetition of
affects and mental images associated with them, whereby this repetition is

1 42 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

never the repetition of the same, but always another return’ (Weigl 1996:
153).

Trauma changes the nature of remembering as it makes such memories
particularly vivid, intrusive, uncontrollable, persistent and somatic. Trau-
matic bodily experiences are a powerful exception to the usual diminishing
intensity of memory with the passage of time (Schudson 1995: 351). For
Nietzsche, memory is a bodily phenomenon which operates on the principle
that ‘if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in’ (1969: 61).
He saw experience of pain as the ‘most powerful aid to mnemonics’ and
argued that ‘whenever mankind has found it necessary to make memory for
itself, it has never come off without blood, torment and sacrifices’ (Nietzsche
1980: 802).

Culbertson (1995) and Brison (1999) assert that traumatic memory is a
kind of somatic memory, as the nature and frequency of sensory, emo-
tional and physiological flashbacks is determined by past trauma. Fre-
quent involuntary renewals of traumatic memories, as they are more
dependent on sensory representations than narrative memories, overcome
emotional and psychological distanciation and assert the moral character
of the self and memory: ‘Traumatic memory blurs the Cartesian mind-
body distinction that continues to inform our cultural narrative about the
nature of the self’ (Brison 1999: 42). The assumption that memory recol-
lection is helped by the body is accepted in investigations of the traumatic
subjective experiences of major personal disasters, such as abuse, rape or
incest. Traumatic memories are also seen as factors that not only shape the
destiny of individuals but also that of human civilization. Experience of
trauma has, however, only recently become an essential element of public
memory.

In the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, memories of
trauma, painful experiences and past wrongdoings were banished to the
private realm and only ‘official history’ was made public. With nation states
rarely confessing to their past wrongdoings, and with some governments (as,
for example, the Nazi one) engaged in a war ‘against memory’ (Levi 1988:
31), it was not until the second part of the twentieth century, that people
were given space to retrieve traumatic memories and allowed to prevent
painful pasts from fading into the oblivion of history. With a general recog-
nition of the emotional and social value of memories of the Holocaust and
Nazi atrocities, a public space for trauma was created. This public space
‘provides a consensual reality and collective memory through which the
fragments of personal memory can be assembled, reconstructed, and dis-
played with a tacit assumption of validity’ (Kirmayer 1996: 195). From the
1980s, personal narratives of the Holocaust brought issues of memory to
public attention. The growing realization that the Nazi past ‘is too massive
to be forgotten and too repellent to be integrated into the “normal” narra-
tive of history’ (Friendlander 1993: 2) has established memory as ‘the

STUDYING MEMORY 143

belated response to the great trauma of modernity’ (Klein 2000: 140), while
‘speaking the unspeakable’ (as the subtitle of Leak and Paizis’ 1999 book
expresses it) has become a source of insights into the Shoah (the Hebrew
name for the Holocaust).

The rediscovery of Holocaust memories is therefore seen not so much as a
question of the return of the repressed but rather as being indicative of the
crisis of western modernity. Historians’ interest in the Holocaust is viewed
as a result of the fact that ‘our epoch has been uniquely structured by
trauma’ (Klein 2000: 138). It was Adorno’s remark that in ‘the concentra-
tion camps it was no longer the individual who died, but the specimen’
(1973: 362) that transformed the Holocaust into a metaphor for the end of
modernity. For Lyotard (1988), Auschwitz also symbolizes the end of uni-
versalism, the beginning of ‘small narratives’ and the end of the Enlighten-
ment idea of progress. Lyotard argues that the Shoah signifies the end of
history, as it demands that the distinctions between history and memory
be overcome in order to narrate what cannot be presented within the
traditional historical perspective. In other words, the Holocaust requires
historians to be ‘both a scientist and an artist at one and the same time’
(Vidal-Naquet 1992: 208). With witnesses’ faith in the adequacy of lan-
guage and the reliability of memory eroded, the issue of how to explore the
Holocaust, the founding moment in the contemporary crisis of testimony,
becomes central to academic work.

The recovery of Holocaust memories has also had a massive impact on
historiography, the humanities and social sciences because it has introduced
these disciplines to the psychoanalytical approach and its effort to confront
and ‘work through’ the memories of catastrophe and trauma. Researchers
exploring memories of trauma, by adopting Freudian methods, study the
testimony of survivors of Nazi atrocities for whom the past is not a problem
of working back but ‘working through’. They try to answer questions about
the degree to which ‘deep memories’ can be recovered, and how the past can
be represented ‘in a way that the truth of its deep memory will not be
forgotten for posterity’ (Hutton 1993: 71-2). As academics realize that ‘a
history of the Nazi crime which did not integrate memory - or rather, diverse
memories - and which failed to account for the transformation of memories
would be a poor history indeed’ (Vidial-Naquet 1992: xxiii), testimonies
of survivors enter into history narratives. The appreciation of testimonies of
traumatic memories as a valuable resource has not only undermined
the distinction between truth and the oral testimony but has also stressed the
urgency of the task because, as a prisoner of Buchenwald says, ‘One day
soon, no one will any longer have the real memory of that smell . . . the smell
of the crematorium: flat, sickening . . . the smell of burnt flesh’ (Semprun
quoted in Gordon 1999: 140,134). When there are no longer survivors left
to testify, when memories are no longer guaranteed and anchored by a body
that lived through the Holocaust, a body that is marked by it - with a

1 44 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

tattooed number being the most literal evidence of this - it must be asked
‘How does one remember?’ (Wiesel quoted in Landsberg 1997: 64). Without
the sensory and mechanical memories which haunt the survivors, the trans-
mission of the Holocaust memory becomes problematic as we cannot really
understand and explore its atrocity.

The issue, however, is not to recall and reconstruct feelings but to give
evidence to truth in order to preserve the moral order: ‘The moral order
requires memory and memory in turn demands certain narrative forms’
(Kugelmass 1996: 195). Therefore, the enormity of the Holocaust cannot be
forgotten and the forms in which it is given expression are important histor-
ical phenomena in their own right. The dominant rhetoric of Primo Levi’s
testimonial writing supports this argument. His phrase ‘the duty to remem-
ber’ means that remembering the Holocaust is an ethico-political problem
because it has to do with the construction of the future: ‘the duty to remem-
ber consists not only in having a deep concern for the past but in transmit-
ting the meaning of the past events to the next generation’ (Ricouer 1999: 9).
The duty to remember is a duty to keep alive the memory of suffering by the
persistent pursuit of an ethical response to the Holocaust experience. Levi, a
prisoner of Auschwitz, tries to understand not ‘only what we are prepared to
admit to our imaginations, but also that which we cannot erase from them’
(Gordon 1999: 133). In other words, the ethical dimension of his work
is more important than the historical one, as the involuntary memory of
the prisoner and the survivor blurs the boundary between the past and the
present, the subconscious and the conscious. The moral duty to remember
and to assign to the memory of the Holocaust an ethical value underlines
Levi’s turn from memories as historical testimony to memories as an ‘ethics
of testimony’. Yet after this ethical turn, after the loss of testimonial, Levi
reinvents the historical consciousness of the Holocaust because he under-
stands the importance of clear distinctions between truth and falsehood, as
he knows that there can be no good use of memory if there are no truth
claims. So, in this sense ‘ history returns as itself prone to trauma and loss, to
fading along with memory’ (Gordon 1999: 140).

With the memory of traumas and catastrophes now constituting a major
field of intellectual inquiry, debates about the past in the public sphere are
currently dominated by discussions of the meaning of traumatic events
(Gray and Oliver 2001: 10). Studies of disruptive events, such as Neal’s
(1998) investigation of wars, depressions and political assassinations in
National Traumas and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American
Century, demonstrate how traumas become a part of the national narrative,
as well as their importance in restoring a sense of moral community. The
memory of the destruction of European Jewry, as a particularly compelling
example of a more general point about history and memory, also calls into
question the validity of memory and its use as testimony in relation to the
judicial process as well as the desirability of retrospective punishment.

STUDYING MEMORY 145

Today, with many newly democratized societies trying to solve their past
traumas by quasi-legal procedures, studying the memory of trauma has
gained a new significance and has become an important focus of research
about collective memory. Hence, the issues of retrospective justice and the
problems connected with attempts to dispose of painful memories will be
our next topic.

Memory and justice

The topic of memory and justice has recently received a lot of attention, not
only from social scientists generally but also from political scientists and
legal theorists. This reorientation of research is connected with the fact that
today many nations, and some international organizations, are deciding
more consciously than ever what they should do about their respective past
wrongdoings. The growing interest of newly democratized societies in
addressing their past wrongdoings, as well as the increased recognition of
the role of the legal system in shaping collective memory have focused
research efforts on new questions concerning the relationship between
memory and justice.

The dilemma as to how and what we should remember to ensure a good
and just society has been long discussed. However, today’s human rights
language, the politics of identity and the spread of democracy facilitate the
forging of a new connection between memory and justice. Assigning a new
value to traumatic memory in a society that opens the space and desire for a
search for new identities and encourages people to stay in touch with their
authentic culture enhances remembering. New attitudes to the past and
changes in remembering the past cannot be comprehended in the light of
previous theories’ explanations of the role of past injustices in the construc-
tion of a nation. Renan’s insistence on forgetting, as an essential element in
the creation and reproduction of a nation (see Chapter 1) is in defiance of the
present focus on remembering past pathologies. Present attempts to con-
front the past are, however, in line with Adorno’s argument that the culture
of forgetting ultimately threatens democracy, because democracy requires
a self-critical ‘working through’ of the past. While writing on the meaning of
coming to terms with the Nazi past, Adorno stresses that ‘the effacement of
memory is more the achievement of an all-too-wakeful consciousness than it
is the result of its weakness in the face of the superiority of unconscious
processes’ (1986: 1117). Ricoeur (1999: 9-12) also argues that, apart from
the duty to forget, we also have a duty to remember. Moreover, there is no
symmetry between the duty to remember and the duty to forget, as only by
remembering can we construct the future, transmit the meaning of past
events to the next generation and become heirs of the past. Whereas the duty
to forget is a duty to go beyond anger and hatred, the duty to remember

1 46 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

keeps ‘alive the memory of suffering over against the general tendency of
history to celebrate victors’ (1999: 9).

While for Ricoeur both memory and forgetting contribute in their respect-
ive ways to the continuation of societies, for liberals, from Hobbes to Rawls,
social amnesia has been the foundation of society as it allows it to start
afresh without inherited resentments. To accomplish political and legal
equality, through contract or convenant, the individual has to forget past
injustices and the social categories that were the marks of inequality (Wolin
1989: 38). This trade-off is rejected by Habermas (1997), who is aware of
the limits to what an ‘ethics of forgetting’ can achieve and emphasizes a
communty’s responsibility for a shared history and its moral accountability
for its past. While liberalism is relatively uninterested in the link between
memory and justice, Habermas (1997) emphasizes the responsibility for a
shared history, although within the limits of the past of the constitutional
order. According to him, we must accept the presence of the past as a
‘burden’ on moral accountability; the Holocaust must never be forgotten or
‘normalized’.

The main reason for the recent increase in awareness of, and attempts to
deal with, past wrongdoings is connected with the changed experiences of
modern societies. Following Mead’s argument that no society would go to
the trouble of reconstructing its past had not some significant problems
disrupted its normal patterns of living (see Chapter 5), it can be argued that
today’s interest in retrospective justice is a result of the new challenges faced
by modern nations. We assume that it is healthier for a society to remember
its collective wrongs because on the one hand we are not afraid that national
unity is threatened by the experience of injustice recollected, and on the
other hand due to the processes of globalization (particularly the globaliza-
tion of the language of human rights) and democratization (including the
‘democratization of history’) every group of people strives to rehabilitate
its past as a part of, and an affirmation of, its identity (Misztal 2001;
Nora 2001). The growing importance of many nations’ attempts to address
their respective past wrongdoings is, thus on the one hand a result of a
global spread of the language of human rights and on the other a conse-
quence of the growing valorization of memory as the essential element of
collective identity. In other words, the growing recognition that nations
need to undertake the difficult task of working through their past path-
ologies is seen as an indispensable element of peaceful coexistence in the
interconnected world.

The last decade of the twentieth century provided us with much evidence
of attempts to address past injustices and, by the same token, to improve
mutual understanding and relations between countries. There have also
been numerous efforts at retroactive justice, which deals with the issues of
how and why democratic regimes settle wrongs that were committed during
an authoritarian era by the state and its agents (Elster 1998). We have

STUDYING MEMORY 147

witnessed a proliferation of apologies for past wrongdoings (e.g. the Pope’s
apologies to Jews and Aboriginals, ‘sorry’ from Japan’s prime minster for
his country’s crimes during World War II, ‘sorry’ from the Canadian prime
minster to his country’s indigenous population), various attempts at retri-
bution (e.g. compensation for the Nazi’s slave workers or the US govern-
ment’s compensation to American citizens of Japanese descent for their
treatment during World War II), and many efforts to discover the truth
about the past. (More than 15 truth commissions were set up during the
1990s to investigate certain aspects of human rights violations under
authoritarian rule, with the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commis-
sion being the first and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Com-
mission being the most recent.) Also, the criminal law has increasingly been
used with a view to teaching a particular interpretation of a country’s
history. This is illustrated by many trials for past crimes (e.g. the trials of
the Nazi collaborators Laval, Touvier, Bousquet, Barbie and Fauvisson in
France and the arrest of Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, for human
rights violations), and the criminalization of denial of certain past events
(e.g. denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offence in Germany). Recent
developments, such as the creation of the Hague International Tribunal, set
to try crimes of war committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was followed
by the establishment of the tribunal on the genocidal civil war in Rwanda
and the creation of the permanent international criminal court, which from
2002 has been a tribunal with worldwide jurisdiction over atrocities and
genocide, signal a growing interest on the part of the international com-
munity in addressing past injustices. As a result of the growing popularity of
an approach to the past that assumes that it should be deliberately remem-
bered, researchers’ attention has been focused on the way in which coun-
tries have been dealing with the Nazi past, the role of the memory of the
communist past in the reconstruction of the new democracies in Eastern
Europe, discourses of retribution and reconciliation in post-authoritarian
regimes, the processes of reconciliation through truth-telling, the healing of
nations through confronting lies and crimes of apartheid and the role of
both remembering and forgetting in enhancing a national unity. It can
therefore be said that coming to terms with the past has emerged as the
grand narrative of recent times.

The importance of dealing with the past is, of course, not a new pre-
occupation. As several authors have recently suggested, while pointing to
the linguistic affinity between ‘amnesty’ and ‘amnesia’, many issues con-
nected with dealing with past wrongdoings on the way to democracy were
experienced in Athens after the civil war of 404 bc (Elster 1998; Ricoeur
1999; Cohen 2001). In the process of restoring Athenian democracy
after the oligarchic coup the democrats ruled that in order to live together
again as a political community and to ensure reconciliation, individual
citizens were forbidden to recall the past. As amnesia became the legal rule,

1 48 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

remembering past injustices bacame a punishable offence. After analysing in
detail this first case of transitional justice in history, Cohen (2001: 342)
concludes that while it was not an example of total amnesia or complete
social harmony, supporters of the oligarchy remained immune from pros-
ecution and the ‘amnesty’ was for the most part respected. Consequently,
the reconstruction and restoration of democracy, as well as the rules of law,
ensured a long period of political stability for the Athenian state.

This approach, which argues that every nation must first fill its internal
fissures and ‘forget’ the antagonism that historically tore it apart, and which
advises the forgetting of past pathologies and crimes, was first questioned by
the Nuremberg Trials (1945-6). Yet this international tribunal, due to the
long list of its shortcomings and an unfavourable political climate for inter-
national cooperation (Taylor 1971; Luban 1987) has had no imitators for
almost 50 years. Moreover, after World War II a need to reintegrate societies
restricted nations’ desires to expose their past and the political climate of the
postwar period favoured forgiving and forgetting. In many countries, after
the initial punishment of leading figures, there was a long period of silence.
In nations like France and Italy, after initial attempts to account for past
wrongdoings and the initial stigmatization of collaborators, myths were
constructed to gloss over the extent and depth of collaboration with the
Nazi regime. In postwar France the complex readjustments that were
designed to defuse political discord by denying the ideological reasons for
the conflict ensured that for many years the truth was sacrificed to national
unity. After World War II, both Gaullists and Communists offered a heroic
reworking of the war in which Vichy was presented as an aberration involv-
ing only a few Frenchmen. The myth of resistance and the need for reconcili-
ation dictated the vision of this remembered past (Rousso 1991; Bernstein
1992; Gross 2000). Italian politicians in the immediate postwar decades
were also quick to define themselves in terms of a defeated enemy against
whom all Italians could unite. Annual national celebrations of the end of the
war focus upon the German atrocities and the unity of the Italian nation in
the struggle leading to postwar democracy.

Recent studies have reopened debates about many countries’ past by
highlighting the political factors behind postwar forgetting. With the publi-
cation of the works of independent and foreign historians revealing French
responsibility for the persecution, exclusion and martyrdom of 70,000
French Jews, France has been involved in coping with what is now known as
‘Vichy Syndrome’ (Rousso 1991). Controversy over the Vichy regime
became especially visible following the 1991 dismissal of charges against
Paul Touvier for crimes against humanity. Following the fiftieth anniversary
of the deportation by French police during the Vichy regime of more than
10,000 non-French Jews from unoccupied areas of France to Auschwitz,
16 July was established as the Day of Remembrance of the racist and
anti-Semitic persecution under the Vichy regime. Now, even countries that

STUDYING MEMORY 149

were more involved than others in the process of denial of their war past
experience constant reinterpretation of their historical past.

After World War II, the Holocaust was a source of taboo and prohibition
in West and East Germany. However, while East Germany marginalized
Jewish suffering, and therefore rejected the relationship between memory
and justice, West German political culture was constrained by shifts in the
dominant interpretations of the Nazi era (Olick and Levy 1997). In the early
postwar period West German democracy ‘did not foster either memory
and justice or democracy’ (Herf 1997: 7-9), yet in the following years
the inherent tension between memory and justice on the one hand and
democracy on the other was one of the central themes of the country’s
postwar history. The initial period - in which the government was reluctant
to embrace the example of Allied tribunals at Nuremberg, the courts were
slow to prosecute Nazi war criminals, the process of de-Nazification was
undermined and important public positions were taken by former National
Socialist officials - was characterized by social amnesia and a weakening of
memory. The policy and practice of the first West German chancellor was
based on the assumption that for the transition of West Germany to a stable
democracy it was a political necessity to adopt silence about the crimes of
the past: ‘Memory and justice might produce, it was argued, a right-wing
revolt that would undermine a still fragile democracy’ (Herf 1997: 7).

However, even during the initial period of reconstruction not everybody
accepted this strategy. Despite the dominant practice of ‘the defusing the
past’ (Habermas 1996: 45) and putting the past behind, there were calls for
recall and reflection on the Nazi past. The political impact of such leaders as
Heuss (who used his presidency to increase Germans’ awareness of Nazi
crimes and to criticize the delay and denial of justice) and Brandt (who fell to
his knees before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial during a visit in the 1970s)
slowly helped to establish more space for discussion and a new understand-
ing that a policy of memory and justice does not have to lead to conflict
(Herf 1997: 7-9).

The Holocaust received more attention in the 1970s (for instance, the
screening of the television series Holocaust sparked the first public discus-
sion of the past), and in the 1980s. Yet, generally it can be said that the Cold
War era ‘brought more democracy at a price of less justice and self-serving
feeble memory’ (Herf 1997: 400). The period was, moreover, not free from
attempts to rewrite history. The most famous was an episode in 1985, when
Chancellor Kohl invited President Regan to participate in a wreath-laying
ceremony at a German military cemetery at Bitburg in a spirit of reconcili-
ation. Regan’s gesture, understood commonly as an attempt to suggest that
the fallen German soldiers and the murdered Jews were both ‘victims’ of
Nazi oppression (Hartman 1986: 6) was widely criticized as an attempt to
‘consolidate the move away from any destabilizing effort to achieve mastery
of the past’ (Habermas 1996: 44). It also had unintended consequences as it

1 50 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

accelerated a series of public exchanges between many prominent German
scholars arguing for and against ‘normalizing’ the Nazi past. The famous
‘Historians’ Debate’, which started in 1986, brought to public attention
hidden meanings in the trend towards normalization, which was seen as
a process involving the marginalization of the Holocaust in German con-
sciousness, weakening the relationship between memory and justice.
Habermas was one of the main protagonists in this debate and opposed
questioning the uniqueness of the Holocaust and calls for forgetting
by showing the importance of the relationship between the public role of
memory and national responsibility: ‘The . . . obligation that we in Germany
have - even if no one else longer assumes it - to keep alive the memory of
suffering of those murdered by German hands, and to keep it alive quite
openly and not just in our mind’ (quoted in LaCapra 1997: 97).

The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war was accompanied by open,
widespread and extensive discussions of Germany’s recent past. The most
recent developments, such as the opening of a Holocaust memorial in the
centre of Berlin in 2001, and the repatriation payments made by German
industry and banks to forced labourers from the Nazi era signal further
changes in the relationship between memory and justice.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990, unified Germany has been
called upon to engage with German history and acknowledge the burden of
the past as part of the process of normalization. Habermas (1997) continues
to argue for a critical evaluation of memory in order to exclude a particular-
istic nationalism and advance constitutional patriotism. United Germany
has also had to wrestle with the issue of its communist past and act on the
former East Germany’s offences in the name of communism (Rosenberg
1995). McAdams (2001), in his survey of Germany’s most recent experi-
ment with retrospective justice, argues that East Germany’s past, although
not really masterable, has at least turned out to be a manageable burden.
The new Germany has taken all possible steps to address past injustices
as the government has decided to draw on multiple options, such as
retribution, disqualifications and various forms of corrective justice. Thus
Germany has had ‘trials and purges and truth commissions and has
systemically opened the secret police files to each and every individual’ (Ash
1997: 195).

By all accounts, concludes McAdams (2001) Germany’s recent experi-
ment offers an illuminating lesson of what can be accomplished when
governments seriously deal with a fractured past. The German case also
shows the challenges a regime faces in helping citizens to confront the
wrongdoings of the past. It provides evidence, according to Habermas
(1997), that the issues of fairness and balance require a wide public debate
on how to interpret the country’s past. It demands that the former West
Germany uphold its action to the same high moral standards that were
applied to its eastern counterparts, and that all citizens engage in discussions

STUDYING MEMORY 151

of the nation’s history. Habermas’ argument, that without public debates on
how to interpret the country’s history, the normalcy of post-unification
Germany will be not secured is reinforced in Sa’dah’s (1998) study of strat-
egies of reconciliation in Germany. She identifies the attitude of Germans
towards their past and examines attempts to procure a democratic con-
sensus and overcome a crisis of German democracy. Sa’dah links collective
memory to the broader concept of political culture as her argument about
reconciliation brings together the ideas of truth, trust and democracy.

Studies of postcommunist countries’ strategies for dealing with a complex
past contribute to our understanding of the complexity of the links between
memory and justice in the context of fragile democracy. They show that,
regardless of adopted strategies (ranging from decisions to ignore the past,
through searching for a middle way to achieve a ‘subtle blend of memory
and forgetting’, to dealing with the past with the help of all possible
strategies), policies of readdressing past injustice are confusing and
costly and, moreover, always raise as many objections as supportive voices
(Huntington 1991; Holmes 1995; Los 1995; Elster 1998; Misztal 1999).

Research into postcommunist attempts to deal with the traumatic past
also identifies the conditions which shape the nature of policy towards past
wrongdoings, such as the nature of the previous system and its mode of
collapse. The scope of freedom enjoyed by various countries in their use of
the past to construct new postcommunist identities depends, it is argued,
upon the type of transition to democracy and the credibility of the main
actors. Studies of strategies for dealing with the past in newly democratized
countries also show that, on the one hand, meeting people’s demands for
justice and information about the past is a very essential step in the further
democratization of Eastern and Central Europe and, on the other hand, that
these investigations demonstrate negative consequences (such as growing
public distrust) of partial, politicized and not very efficient implementations
of policies dealing with past injustice for new democracies.

Among polices which have been implemented in Eastern European coun-
tries to deal with their communist past, the most common are: polices of
lustration (screening the past of candidates for important positions with the
aim of eliminating them from important public office), decommunization
(excluding former Communist Party officials from high public positions),
restitution of property, recompensation and rehabilitation of victims. The
issue of lustration/decommunization emerged on the public agenda of
almost all postcommunist countries (Schwartz 1995) and in the majority of
them it has been a source of great controversy (Kritz 1995). Only in the
Czech Republic has the policy of lustration been fully adopted, ensuring the
disqualification of employees from high-ranking government posts for a
period of five years if they were found to have been agents or informants of
the secret police (Trucker 1999). In Russia and in the former republics of the
USSR ‘the abstention from pursuing retroactive justice happened more or

1 52 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

less by default’ (Elster 1998: 18). Poland’s long and protracted history of
legislative attempts to introduce lustration law started with the first Polish
postcommunist government trying to ‘let bygones be bygones’ in the name
of reconciliation and transformation. This forward-looking approach, aim-
ing to smooth and stabilize the transformation process (Los 1995; Misztal
1999), very quickly attracted criticism for preserving intact the identity of
the former communists. Ten years later, in 1999, due to continuous calls to
address the past, Poland passed a lustration law which imposed a forced
compromise, the importance of which was reduced by conflicts over pre-
vious misfired lustration bills. A decade-long controversy over how to
address the communist past, which convinced Poles that the way justice is
defined and the decision of whose vision of the past is adopted depends
wholly on who holds political power, illustrates that ‘justice is more polit-
ical in transitional situations than under normal circumstances’ (Elster
1989: 16).

Studies of the many fragile democracies in Latin America examine how
post-authoritarian societies cope with the legal, moral and practical difficul-
ties connected with the choice between truth and justice, forgiving and
forgetting (Weschler 1990; Huntington 1991; Huyse 1995; Kritz 1995; Linz
and Stepan 1997; Osiel 1997). Although they show that securing justice
for past wrongdoings has always been an extremely flawed exercise, these
investigations argue that by allowing victims to tell their stories and
by undermining the previous official version of history such approaches
are necessary and justified. As all post-liberated or post-authoritarian
societies, despite the pain and the cost induced, continue to search for
truth, it becomes clear that a new institutional order cannot avoid confront-
ing people’s long memories and desire for justice. Countries as diverse as
Chile, Argentina and Honduras have found ways to hold former officials
accountable for offences.

Of all the new democracies that struggled with the issue of retrospective
justice in the 1990s, the operations of the South Africa Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission (TRC), which between 1994-8 investigated gross
violations of human rights, seem to be the most comprehensive attempt at
confronting the past and coming to terms with it (Nuttall and Coetzee
1998). The people responsible for the TRC’s success understood the import-
ance of justice and truth, and knew that the policy of trading justice for truth
entails a moral sacrifice (Gutmann 1999; Jeffery 1999; Johnson 1999).
The TRC may not have managed to ensure total justice, but as Richard
Goldstone, a South African constitutional court judge, remarked ‘making
public the truth is itself a form of justice’ (quoted in Ash 1997: 20). All
the truth commissions that were set up around the world to investigate
certain aspects of human rights violations under authoritarian rule (see e.g.
Ensalaco 1994; Hayner 1994; Huyse 1995; Wilson 2000), tried to revitalize
citizens’ respect for the rule of law and promote a new culture of human

STUDYING MEMORY I 53

rights, as well as a national consensus and solidarity. They aimed to help
reconciliation by simultaneously discovering historical truth and facilitating
a national unity. While all truth commissions faced many problems and
criticisms, their establishment and functioning, as well as the recent creation
of a world criminal court at The Hague, are indicative of new attitudes
toward the past. With the willingness of nation states to apologize for past
wrongs committed in their name becoming a worldwide phenomenon, we
are witnessing the emergence of a new international morality, one which is
rooted in both the power of human rights and the power of identity politics
(Barkan 2000).

All the above examples suggest that attempts to silence oppositional
memory may actually have the opposite effect. Many studies show that
attempts to simply ‘draw a line’ under the past satisfy nobody. Con-
sequently, various nations are, particularly now in the context of the global-
ization of the language of human rights and the importance of memory as a
source of collective identity, forced to pay more attention to the ways in
which they deal with the past (Osiel 1997). Yet investigations of various
attempts at retrospective justice warn that we cannot rely solely on memory
to render perfect justice, and that judicial outcomes cannot capture the
complexity of history. Since memory, viewed as the representation of the
past in the present rather than really the past, is always subject to change
and can be irrational, subjective, inconsistent and self-serving, we should
aim to achieve a balance between memory, which requires a narrator whose
credibility can always be questioned, and a critical, scientific and objective
distance by checking documents and archives which inform us of the ‘facts’
of what happened (Ricoeur 2001). However, because such confrontation
does not necessarily solve all tensions between memory and history, and
because of the problematic nature of memory, we need to depend upon a
plurality of contending narratives and the civility of rules in the management
of these strains. In other words, what happened can be discovered only
under conditions of diversity and discourse, by relying ‘not on a single narra-
tor, but rather on a plurality of contending voices speaking to one another’
(Sennett 1998: 14).

To sum up, this survey of the four fields of studying memory shows their
richness and their contribution to our understanding of the relationship
between nation states and their respective pasts, and the construction of
preserved collective memories. In studies of memory trauma - now a major
field of intellectual inquiry - debates about the past in the public sphere
focus on the meaning of traumatic events, and tend to argue that revealing
and acknowledging the truth about the past is an essential step in the
preservation of moral order.

The chapter also shed light on the process of political change and the role
of social memory in any successful transformation from an authoritarian to
a democratic regime. An increasing recognition of the role of legal systems in

1 54 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

shaping collective memory has focused research efforts on new questions
concerning the relationship between memory and justice.

Further reading

Adorno, T.W. (1986) What does coming to terms with the past mean?, trans. T. Bahti
and G. Hartman, in G. Hartman (ed.) Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective ,
pp. 114-29. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Ashplant, T.G., Dawson, G. and Roper, M. (2000) The politics of war memory and
commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics, in T.G. Ashplant, G. Dawson
and M. Roper (eds) The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration , pp. 1-87.
London: Routledge.

Booth, W.J. (1999) Communities of memory: on identity, memory, and debt,
American Political Science Revieiv, 93(2): 249-68.

Gillis, J.R. (1994) Introduction: memory and identity, in J.R. Gillis (ed.)
Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity, pp. 3-26. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.

Elster, J. (1998) Coming to terms with the past, European Journal of Sociology,
XXXIX(l): 7-48.

Winter, J. and Sivan, E. (eds) (1999) War and Remembrance in the Tiventieth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

GLOSSARY

adolescence: a stage in life that separates childhood from adulthood,
amnesia: refers to the loss of memory of events or experiences due to some physical
or psychological trauma.

art of memory: ars memoria, attributed to the poet Simonides (c. 556 — 468 bc), was a
technique employed by orators to remember long passages that involved locating
each element to be remembered in an imaginary palace of memory so that it could
be easily recovered in its proper place by tracing a mental path through the palace,
autobiographical memory: memory about the self that provides a sense of identity
and continuity. It is a source of information about our lives, as we reconstruct the
past when telling others and ourselves the story of our life.

Cold War: the ideological battle between capitalist democratic states, led by the USA,
and the now fallen communist systems, led by the Soviet Union, over the period
1947-89.

collective or social, memory: a group’s representation of its past, both the past that is
commonly shared and the past that is collectively commemorated, that enacts and
gives substance to that group’s identity, its present conditions and its vision of the
future.

commemoration: ceremonial services to remember and honour the memory of past
heroes or crucial national events; the word ‘commemoration’ derives from the
Latin com (together) and momorare (to remember),
corporeal memory: a kind of somatic memory in which recollection is helped by the
body into which memory is inscribed by - for example, pain or disfigurement,
counter-memory: an alternative view of the past which challenges the dominant
representation of the past.

cultural memory: memory constructed from cultural forms and which thus refers to
the recollection of events of which we do not necessarily have first-hand
knowledge.

discourse: a coherent set of statements presenting a particular view of the world,
dominant ideology thesis: the theory, with roots in the Marxist tradition, argues that
the ruling class controls the production of ideas as well as material production; it

GLOSSARY 1 59

therefore creates and sustains sets of beliefs and ideas that claim objectivity
and thus inveigle subordinate classes and minority groups into accepting their
disadvantaged condition.

embodied: refers to the significance of bodies in conferring identities based on age,
physical characteristics, sex and skin colour,
flashbulb memories: memories that are distinctly vivid, precise, concrete, long-lasting
recollections of the personal circumstances surrounding people’s experience of
unusual events.

frame: an element out of which definitions of situations are built up. Framing was
Goffman’s (1974) notion to describe our ways of organizing experiences into
meaningful activities, and ensures the clarity and simplicity of the definition of a
situation.

generation: a cohort of people who are more or less the same age and who, by virtue
of undergoing similar experiences, perceive historical events from more or less a
similar perspective.

generational memory: the memory shared by people born at about the same time
who have grown up in the same historical period, which shapes their views,
habit-memory: memory that allows us to recall the signs and skills we use in everyday
life as well as to reproduce routine activities and ritual performances.
habitus: the system of durable thoughts, behaviours and tastes produced by objective
structures and conditions but which are also capable of producing and repro-
ducing those structures (Bourdieu 1977: 72). Habitus organizes the way in which
individuals see the world and act in it.

hegemony: the all-embracing cultural and social dominance of a ruling group that
legitimates its leadership by creating and sustaining an ideology presenting its
dominance as fair and in the best interests of society as a whole,
hermeneutic: a theory of interpretation and understanding of texts and works of art
that studies the problem of how to give meaning to cultural products,
heritage industry: the marketing of the past, closely connected with people’s need
for a sense of the past, belonging and identity as well for entertainment; associ-
ated with the development of forms of tourism that promote ‘historic’ places,
such as old towns, villages and museums, and with preserving or re-enacting the
past.

historiography: the art of writing history and the study of historical writings. To
study historiography is to study the methodological questions formulated in
historical accounts of the past.

identity: a relatively stable set of perceptions by which we define ourselves and which
allow us to project ourselves into the future,
ideology: a coherent set of ideas and beliefs that shapes a group’s view of the world,
and which provides the basis for the justification of that group’s social status and
political action.

invented traditions: traditions, which, in according to the presentist approach, were
manipulated by the dominant sectors of society through public commemorations,
education systems, mass media, official records and chronologies. Traditions are
‘invented’ in the sense of being deliberately designed and produced with a view
to creating new political realities, defining nations and sustaining national
communities (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
keying: refers to Goffman’s (1974) concept of the key - the set of conventions by

1 60 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary
framework, is transformed into something patterned on, but independent of, it.
legitimacy: the belief of citizenry that power is lawful and that a political leadership
and political order are well-founded, fair and binding,
lustration: the policy of checking or screening the past for candidates to some
important positions, the main being the elimination from important public office
people who worked in, or collaborated with, the communist security forces,
memory: a faculty by which we remember. Although there is a lack of consensus on
how memory works, both the recent neuroscientific argument that memory is a set
of encoded neural connections and the suggestion in interdisciplinary studies of
the role of subjectivity in remembering seem to be accepted as the way forward in
the conceptualization of memory. In the sociological perspective, memory is best
understood as representations of the past which involve emotions and reconstruc-
tions of past experiences in such a way as to make them meaningful in the present
(Schacter 1996; Prager 1998).

mnemonic communities: groups that socialize us to what should be remembered and
what should be forgotten. These communities, such as the family, the ethnic group
or the nation, provide the social contexts in which memories are embedded and
mark the emotional tone, depth and style of our remembering,
mnemonic socialization: the process by which people, especially children, learn what
should be remembered and what should be forgotten; they are familiarized with
their collective past so that the continuity and identity of the group are sustained,
narrative: an account, or narration, of events, stories or tales.

official memory: memory that is the dominant national narrative, strategically
employed by political elites who revise national history in such a way as to secure
the status quo. Official memory is expressed most explicitly in the form of
monuments, textbooks and the public remembrance and commemoration of key
events.

popular memory: discursive practice, subordinated in its relation to the dominant
discourse, which, as an aspect of political cultures, reproduces the established
consensual view of the past.

public memory: beliefs and ideas about the past that help a society interpret its past
and present as well as project its future. Public memory, according to Bodnar
(1992) is a cognitive device to mediate competing interpretations, although it
privileges some explanations over others.

realms of memory: Nora’s (1996a) notion for various cultural forms, such as archives,
organized celebrations, museums, cemeteries, festivals, statues and monuments,
that are (when living memory disappears) constructed by modern societies to
remind us about the past and history.

retrospective justice: attempts by post-authoritarian, newly democratized regimes to
settle the wrongs that were committed during the previous era.
rhetoric: the art of using language effectively; the systematic study of how public
speaking can be persuasive.

ritual: a form of patterned social practice that serves, among other things, to create
and recreate the sense of individual and collective identity,
screen memories: memories which, according to Freud, block access to more
disturbing memories of a traumatic past.

social constructionism: theories that emphasize the socially created nature of col-

GLOSSARY 161

lective life and therefore underline the importance of inquiry into the manner in
which whatever passes as natural reality is in fact socially constructed,
sociology of memory: a study of the content and social formation of collective
memory by way of exploring its conditions and factors, (e.g. language, rituals,
physical objects) that make remembering in common possible. Based on the
argument that memory is intersub jectively constituted, the sociology of memory is
interested in the ways in which social and cultural dimensions are woven together
to create collectively significant representations of the past (Funkestein 1993;
Schudson 1997; Zerubavel 1997; Prager 1998; Sherman 1999).
totalitarianism: an undemocratic political system in which power is concentrated in
the hands of a dictator and in which the dominance of one ideology, the role of a
secret police and lack of freedom of the mass media ensure the subordination of
the masses.

tradition: a set of long-established social practices or beliefs that are handed down
from one generation to the next.

trauma: initially referring to the physical effects of accidents, trauma came to be
associated with an unforgettable shock causing a deep psychological wound,
traumatic memory: memory that has its origin in some terrible experience and
which is particularly vivid, intrusive, uncontrollable, persistent and somatic.

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INDEX

adolescent memories, 85, 86-8
Adorno, T., 21, 143, 145
Africa

invention of traditions in colonial
Africa, 58
oral culture in, 29
South Africa, 147, 152
African-Americans

and generational memory, 90
and the Lincoln Memorial, 131
Albertus Magnus, 3, 32
alternative memories, 68, 130
amnesia

and amnesty, 147-8
and collective memory, 156, 157
and Nazi Germany, 149
structural, 30

and trauma memories, 140, 141
see also forgetting
analogies of memory, 3
ancient Greece

and the art of memory, 30-2
and generation, 83
and history and memory, 110
and imagination and memory, 115
reconstruction of democracy in,
147-8

and sites of remembrance, 16
Anderson, Benedict, 17, 60, 136
Annales school, 102
appropriated memories, 76

Aquinas, St Thomas, 32, 34
archives, 43, 105
and new technology, 48
Aristotle, 31, 109

art of memory (ars memoria ), 30-2,
34-5

artistic world and memory, 44-5
Assmann, J., 23 — 4
Auden, W.H., 155
Augustine, St, 32

Auschwitz concentration camp, and
Holocaust memory, 121-2, 143,
144
Australia

creating national identities in, 136
war memorials in, 130
autobiographical (personal) memory,
9-10, 78-9, 87

autonomy, and collective memory,
14-15

Bacon, Francis, 38

The Advancement of Learning,

Balzac, Honore de, 116
Barclay, C.R., 78-9
Bartlett, Frederic, 82, 118-19
Bauman, Z., 119
Benjamin, Walter, 16-17, 45, 141
Bergson, Henri, 44, 118
on time and memory, 109-11, 112

1 82 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Billig, M., 17-18

Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Studies, Popular Memory Group,
63-4
bodies

the embodied self, 75-83, 98
and time, 114

and trauma memories, 141-2, 143-4
see also mind-body distinction
Bodnar, J., 67
Bouchard, D.F., 65
Bourdieu, Pierre, 88, 89, 98
the brain, and laboratory-based memory
research, 76
Brandt, Willy, 149
Brison, S., 142
Britain

collective memory in, 39^40
and the heritage industry, 47
invention of traditions in, 57-8
Italian immigrants and identity
formation, 137
British Museum, 39-40
Bush, President George W., 96-7
Byatt, A.S., 116

change

memory and the process of, 156-7
see also technological change
Chernobyl memory, 136
childhood memories, 17, 19, 76, 77
traumatic, 77, 139, 140
China, 18

Christianity, and memory in the Middle
Ages, 33-4

Cicero, 31, 32, 37, 100
cinematography, 43
cities, and communities of memory,
16-17

civic anniversaries, 2
cognitive psychology

and autobiographical memory, 87
and studies of memory, 76
Cold War, 2
collective memory, 155
conceptualization of, 4
contested, 120-5
defining, 7

and democracy, 156
and the dynamics of memory
approach, 67-8
and flashbulb memory, 8 1
forms and functions of, 10-15
and generational memory, 83-91
Halbwachs on the social context of,
50-6

and history, 101-7
and imagination, 119
and the invention of traditions, 56-61
and justice, 145-54
and popular memory, 7, 40-1, 61-7
and time, 112-14, 115
colonialism

decolonisation, 107
and the invention of traditions, 5 8
Comaroff, J., 136-7
commemorative rituals and practices, 2,
4, 6, 8, 126-32
and bodily practices, 80
in Britain, 39

and cultural memory, 12-13, 130-2
Durkheim on, 51, 70
and the dynamics of memory, 69-70
and habit memory, 10
and national identities, 15
and war memory, 127-30, 131, 132
commemorative symbols, 4
communist countries
forced forgetting in, 18
memories after the collapse of
communism, 12, 132, 136, 147
communities of memory (mnemonic
communities), 15-19
community-based small memories,

46-7

Connerton, P., 69-70, 80
Hoiv Societies Remember, 5
constitutional patriotism, 134
contested memories, 120-5
and Holocaust memory, 2, 8, 48, 90,
121-4

counter-memory, 62, 64-5, 130
creative writing, 3-4
crisis of memory, 43-4, 46
Culbertson, R., 142
cult of memory, 135

INDEX 183

cultural memory, 2, 12-13, 62, 130-2
cultural narratives, and the dynamics of
memory approach, 74
cultural turn in history, 107
Czech Republic, 151

Darwin, Charles, 41
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 116
Dean, John, 79

declarative (semantic) memory, 9, 75
DeCook, P.A., 79
Defoe, Daniel, 116
democracy

and collective memory, 156
and commemorative activities, 127
and generational memory, 85-6
and identity and memory, 138
and the invention of traditions, 57, 58
and justice, 145

and retrospective justice, 146-54
democratization of memory, 47, 104,
156

and the French Revolution (1789), 39
and justice, 146
and war memory, 129
Deutsch, Karl, 14

diaspora, and identity formation, 137
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 117
DiMaggio, R, 3

dominant ideology, and the popular
memory approach, 61-7
Draaisma, D., 3
Durkheim, E., 4, 7

and commemorative rituals, 51, 70
and the dynamics of memory
approach, 69, 73

and Halbwach on the social context of
memory, 50-1, 54
and the invention of tradition
approach, 56

and the normative aspect of tradition,
94

on time, 112

dynamics of memory approach, 67-74
and cultural narratives, 74
and Halbwachs on the social context
of memory, 69, 71, 73
and Watergate memories, 71-2

Eco, Umberto, 138
electronic diaries, 3
electronic media, 2, 22, 24-5, 48
and generational memory, 86
embedded and embodied memory,

77-8, 98

emblems of remembrance, 3
embodied self, 75-83, 98
emotions and memory, 1, 37, 80-1, 98
generational memory, 88
and history, 99
and time, 111
encyclopaedias, 37-8
the Enlightenment, 36-7, 37-8, 44, 91,
143

ethnic memories, 2, 18, 136-7
and oral cultures, 28
ethnicity, and generational memory, 89,
90

Europe, memory in pre-modern, 32-7
evolutionary theory, 41-2
explanatory pluralism, 2
Eyerman, R., 89

false memory syndrome, 77-8
family memories, 18-19
and individual memory, 5 1
Fentress, J., 55, 137
fiction and memory, 116-17
films, 2, 25, 116, 131
flashbulb memory, 76, 81, 87
Flaubert, Gustave, 116
forgetting, 156

and the construction of national
identities, 17-18
and frames of meaning, 83
and the futurists, 44-5
and the invention of traditions, 60
and justice, 145, 146
and oral cultures, 29
and trauma memories, 139 — 41
see also amnesia
Fortier, A.M., 137
Foucault, M.

concepts of popular memory, 62-3,
64

and counter-memory, 64-5, 130
and history, 102

1 84 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Fox, C. Letty, 116

frames of meaning, 82-3, 98

France

Annales school, 102
collective memory in, 39, 42
history and memory in, 103-4, 106
Vichy Regime and retrospective
justice, 148-9
war memory in, 45, 129
French Revolution (1789), 38-9, 66,

106

Freud, S., 3,4, 44, 140, 141
Funkenstein, A., 5
Fussel, Paul, 128
futurists, 44-5

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 95, 117-18
Gandhi, M., 58
Gellner, E., 60

gender, and generational memory, 89,

generational memory, 83-91, 98
adolescent memories, 85, 86-8
and generational identity, 88
and habitus, 88-90
and tradition, 90-1
Germany

remembrance of the Nazi past, 59-60,
130, 145, 149-50
retrospective justice in reunited,

150-1

see also Holocaust memory
Giddens, A., 5, 93
globalization

and communities of memory, 18, 19
and generational memory, 86
and history, 104
and justice, 146
and national identity, 134, 135
and time, 115
and tradition, 93, 97
Goffman, E.

Frame Analysis, 82-3, 98
and keying, 96, 98
Goldstone, Richard, 152
Great War see World War I
Greece see ancient Greece
group memories, 47

ethnic memories, 2, 18, 28, 136-7
and Halbwachs on the social context
of memory, 51-6, 69, 112
and history, 101-2
and identity, 133, 138
tradition in, 98

Habermas, Jurgen, 146, 150, 151
habit memory, 10, 80, 110
habitus, and generational memory,
88-90, 98

Hacking, I., 27, 37, 42, 126
Hague International Tribunal, 147,

153

Halbwachs, Maurice, 4, 5, 7, 16, 45-6,
128

and the dynamics of memory
approach, 69, 71, 73
on generational memory, 84
and history and memory, 101-2, 103,
104, 105

and the social context of memory,
50-6, 77

on time and memory, 1 12-13
and tradition, 91, 93, 93-4, 97
and trauma memories, 141
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 3
Harper, S., 63

Heidegger, Martin, 95, 111, 114, 117
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 41
heritage industry, 47, 157
Herodotus, 100

Hervieu-Leger, D., Religion as a Chain
of Memory, 94

history and memory, 99-108, 124
in classical antiquity, 100
and collective memory, 101-7
and the crisis of historicism, 102-3
and the cultural turn, 107
and the development of print culture,
35-6

and the dynamics of memory
approach, 69, 70-1
and generational memory, 88
and literacy, 24

and nineteenth-century historians,
100-1

and ‘recovered history’, 113-14

INDEX 185

and retrospective justice, 153
and trauma, 143

History of the Peloponnesian War,

116

Hobbes, Thomas, 108, 117, 146
Hobsbawm, E., 58

and Ranger, T., Invention of
Tradition, 56, 57, 59, 93, 127
Holocaust memory, 2, 8, 48, 90, 121-4,
139

in American life, 123-4
and the convent controversy at
Auschwitz, 121-2
and Holocaust denial, 122-3
and retrospective justice, 149-50
sacralization of, 123
and trauma, 142-4
Holy Land, and communities of
memory, 16
human rights

and justice, 145, 146, 147, 153
and the legal system, 20
and national memories, 18
Hume, David, 117
hysteria, 139, 140

identity aspect of tradition, 93-4
identity and memory, 1-2, 8, 14, 36-7,
132-9, 155-6

and collective identity, 132-3, 135,
138-9

and contested memories, 120-5
generational memory, 88
Halbwachs on the social context of,
52, 55

and heritage, 135

history and French cultural identity,
104

and the media, 25
and personal identity, 133
and postmodernism, 134
see also national identities
identity politics, 47, 134, 135, 138
and ethnic group memories, 18,

136-7

and justice, 145, 153
ideology

and the invention of traditions, 6 1

popular memory and the dominant
ideology, 61-7

images and words, and the status of
memory, 22-3

imagination and memory, 115-20,
124-5

philosophers on, 117-18
rationalization and individual
memories, 118-19
imagined communities, 17, 60, 136
India, invention of traditions in British
India, 58

individual memories

autobiographical, 9-10, 78-9, 87
cultural context of, 8 1-2
and the embodied self, 75-83
flashbulb memory, 76, 81, 87
Halbwachs on the social context of,
51,52-5

and imagination, 118-19
and oral cultures, 29
and social memory, 5-6, 7, 1 1
tradition in, 98
industrial capitalism, and the

disintegration of collective memory,
45-6

Inglis, K., 130

institutions of memory, 19-22
interdisciplinary integration of memory
studies, 7-8
internet, 3, 48

and family memories, 19
intersubjectivist approach to memory, 6,
10-11

and the embodied self, 77, 78
intuition, Bergson’s theory of, 110-11
invention of traditions (presentist
approach), 7, 55, 56-61
and the dynamics of memory
approach, 67-8, 73
and generational memory, 89
and popular memory, 61-2
Irving, David, 122
Italy, invention of traditions in, 58

Jerusalem, and communities of memory,
16

John Paul II, Pope, 121

1 86 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Judaism

and identity, 135
and religious memory, 33
and the story of Masada, 113-14
see also Holocaust memory
justice and memory, 8, 145-54
retrospective justice, 8, 145, 146-54
and truth commissions, 147, 152

Keneally, Thomas, 116

Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 87

keying, 96-7, 98

Kohl, Helmut, 149

Koshar, R., 130

Kosovo, lost Battle of (1389), 14

laboratory-based memory research, 76
landscape and memory, 16-17
language, 3

and the emotional impact of
memories, 81
and social memory, 6, 11
Latin America, retrospective justice in,
152

Latvia, social memory in Soviet, 14
Le Goff, J., 27, 29, 99
legal system, and collective memory,
20-1

Levi, Primo, 144

liberals, and national identities, 134
libraries, 3, 37, 105
and the futurists, 45
and new technology, 48
Lincoln, Abraham, 72, 131
Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the
Holocaust, 122-3
literacy

manuscript, 32-3

and oral traditions of memory,

23-4

literature, and imagination and memory,
115-17

Locke, John, 3, 36-7, 133
Lowenthal, D., 103
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 143

McAdams, A.J., 150
Maier, C.S., 138

Mannheim, K., 87, 89

‘The Problem of Generation’, 84-5
manuscript literacy, 32-3
Marias, J., 84, 89
Marx, Karl, 42, 72
Matsuda, M.K., 44
Mead, G.H., 4, 112, 113-14, 146
media

and collective memory, 22
and family memories, 19
and Holocaust memory, 124
and the invention of traditions, 56
and national identity, 134
and the status of memory, 25
and Watergate memories, 79
see also electronic media
melancholia, 141
memory aids, 3, 7
memory distortions, 76
memory experience, 9-25

forms and functions of memory,
9-15

institutions of memory, 19-22
and mnemonic communities, 15-19
status of memory, 7, 22-5
memory projects, 48
memory studies, 126-54, 155
and commemorative activities,
126-32

and history, 102, 103
identity and memory, 132-9
trauma memories, 139-45
metamorphosis of memory, 27-49
and the art of memory, 30-2, 34-5
memory in modern society, 37-46
memory in oral cultures, 27-30
memory in pre-modern Europe,
32-7

metaphors of memory, 3
metaphyics, time and memory, 109
Middle Ages, 32-4, 36
Milosz, C., 9

mind-body distinction, 80
and time, 110
and trauma memories, 152
mnemonic communities, 15-19
and frames of meaning, 82
modern society, memory in, 37-46

INDEX 187

modernity

and collective memory, 8
and the crisis of memory, 44
and Holocaust memory, 143
and national identity, 134
and time, 109
and tradition, 91
Montaigne, M. de, 117
monuments, 127

and contested memories, 121
Morrison, Toni, 116
museums, 37, 105, 127
in Britain, 39-40
and collective memory, 21
and the futurists, 44-5
and the heritage industry, 47
and new technology, 48
Muslims, and Serbs, 14

Nabokov, Vladimir, 116
narrative identity, and the dynamics of
memory approach, 70
national identities, 133-6

and communities of memory, 15,
17-18

Halbwachs on the social context of
memory and, 52

history and national memory, 101,
106

and memory in modern society, 40
and the nineteenth-century nation
state, 38-9, 41
post-colonial, 68
and the status of memory, 26
and war memorials, 130
National Trust (Britain), 40, 47
Neal, A.G., National Trauma and
Collective Memory, 144
Neisser, U., 79

new technologies see technological
change

Nietzche, F., 43, 142
Nixon, Richard, 79
Nora, Pierre, 90, 96, 128
on history and memory, 103, 104-6
normative aspect of tradition, 93, 94-5
normative dimension of memory, 157
novels and memory, 3-4, 116-17

Novick, P., The Holocaust in American
Life, 123-4, 132
Nuremberg trials, 20, 148
Nussbaum, M.C., 2

Olick, J.K., 126, 132
oral traditions of memory, 22, 23 — 4,
27-30

and ethnic memory, 28
and history, 102
and manuscript literacy, 32-3
and myths of origin, 28-9
Oretga y Gasset, J., 119
Orwell, George, 120

Pascal, Blaise, 117
Passerini, Luisa, Fascism in Popular
Memory, 64
the past

and collective memory, 2
and contested memories, 120-5
and cultural memory, 12-13
and the dynamics of memory
approach, 67-74
and the Enlightenment, 38
and habit memory, 10
and the heritage industry, 47
history and memory, 99-100,

107-8

and the intersubjectivist approach to
memory, 6, 11-12
and the invention of tradition, 7, 56
and literacy, 24
and memory experience, 9
and the Middle Ages, 33
and oral cultures, 28
and postmodernism, 116-17
and Romanticism, 41
time and memory, 109, 113-14
Pearson, R., 63

personal (autobiographical) memory,
9-10, 78-9, 87

personally acquired memories, 76
philosophers on memory, 117-18, 133
photography, 25, 42-3
Plato, 3,23, 31,32
poetry, and imagination and memory,
115-16

1 88 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

Poland

and the convent controversy at
Auschwitz, 121-2
partition of, 16
retrospective justice in, 152
Polanyi, M., 95-6

political identity see identity politics
political memories, and adolescence, 86
politicization of memory, 47
popular culture, and war memory, 131
popular memory, 7, 61-7
and history, 102
and national identity, 40-1
post-traumatic stress disorder, 139
postcommunist countries, 12, 136, 147,
151-2

postmodernism, 116-17, 134
power

and collective memory, 4
and popular or counter-memories, 65,
66-7

and tradition, 92
Prager, Jeffrey, 79, 81

study of false memory syndrome,

77-8

presentist approach see invention of
traditions (presentist approach)
print culture, and memory in pre-
modern Europe, 35-6
procedural memory, 9, 75
propaganda, and collective memory, 15
Proust, Marcel, 108, 1 1 1—12, 116
Remembrance of Things Past, 4, 45,
111

psychoanalysis, 44
and trauma memories, 139-41

Ranke, Leopold von, 40, 100

rational choice theory, 157

rational identity, 155-6

Rawls, John, 146

Reagan, Ronald, 149

Realms of Memory, 103-4

Recovered Memory Movement, 77, 139

religion

and memory in the Middle Ages, 33-4
memory as a ‘surrogate’, 47
religious memory, 25, 94

Remembrance of Things Past (Proust),
4,45,111

the Renaissance, 34-6
Renan, Ernst, 17
representational memory, 110
repressed memories, 139-41
retrospective justice, 8, 145, 146-54
and the Holocaust, 149-50
The Return of Martin Guerre (film), 116
Ricoeur, P., 145-6
Roman antiquity, and the art of
memory, 31, 32
Romantic movement, 41
Rubin, D.C., 79
Rushdie, S., 115
Russia

post-communist, 151-2
Soviet Union, 132, 136
Russian Revolution (1917), 66

sacralization of memory, 157
Holocaust memory, 123
Sa’dah, A., 151
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 111, 118
Schindler’s List, 116
schools, and collective memory, 19, 20
Schudson, M., 13, 68-9, 71-2
Schuman, H., 86
Schwartz, B., 67, 72-3, 96, 113
science

and history and memory, 100-1
and memory in pre-modern Europe,
35

progress and scientific knowledge, 38
scientific research on memory, 3
Scott, J., 86
Scott, Walter, 116

semantic (declarative) memory, 9, 75
Serbs, and Muslims, 14
shared memory, 83

and generational memory, 88
Sherman, D .J., The Construction of
Memory in Interwar France, 129
Shils, E., 4-5, 94-5
short-term memory, 75, 76
Simonides of Ceos, 31
sites of remembrance, 2, 6, 16, 105
Sivan, E., 106

INDEX 189

social class

and generational memory, 89
and tradition, 93-4
social context of individual memory,

5-6

social control, and the invention of
traditions, 56-61

social memory see collective memory
social sciences and memory, 4, 44, 45-6
and history, 101-2
and time, 109, 112
sociology
and time, 115
and tradition, 9 1
Socrates, 30-1

South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, 147, 152
Soviet Union

and Chernobyl memory, 136
collapse of the, 132
space, and group memories, 52
Spielberg, Steven, 48
Spillman, Lyn, 135-6
Spinoza, B., 117
spontaneous memory, 111
the state, and the invention of traditions,
56-61

status of memory, 7, 22-5
Stern, M., 136-7
structural amnesia, 30
Sturken, M., 131
subjectivity

history and memory, 110
time and memory, 110, 111, 112
see also intersubjectivist approach to
memory

technological change

and collective memory, 22
and memory in modern society, 37,
42-3

and the status of memory, 25
and time, 115
Terdiman, R., 1
testimony

imagination and memory and,

119-20

and trauma memories, 143

textbooks, and collective memory, 20
theories of remembering, 50-74
dynamics of memory approach,
67-74

Halbwachs and the social context of
memory, 50-6

invention of traditions (presentist
approach), 7, 55, 56-61
popular memory approach, 7, 61-7
Thompson, Anzac Memories: Living
ivith the Legend, 64
Thucydides, 116
Tibet, 18

time and memory, 108-15, 124
autobiographical memory changing
over, 79

and collective memory, 112-14,

115

and globalization, 115
and group memories, 52
and identity, 137
inner time and material time, 110
public and private time, 108
Titanic catastrophe, 115
tradition, 91-8

and the crisis of memory, 43^1
and the Enlightenment, 38, 91
ethnic identity and the cult of, 138
and generational memory, 90-1
hermeneutic aspect of, 93, 95-6
and history and memory, 104
identity aspect of, 93-4
and keying, 96-7, 98
normative aspect of, 93, 94-5
and radical thought, 91-2
see also invention of traditions
(presentist approach)
tradition-building, and collective
memory, 4-5

trauma memories, 8, 68, 80, 139-45
and psychoanalysis, 139-41
and retrospective justice, 153
trust, and testimony, 120
Turner, B., 89

United States of America
African-Americans, 90, 131
and generational memory, 87

1 90 THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

and the Holocaust in American life,
123-4

memories of Lincoln, 62
Recovered Memory Movement, 77,
139

war and Protestant-inspired
moralism, 72, 96-7
Washington’s Vietnam War memorial,
121, 130

Watergate memories, 71-2, 79
utopianism, 91

Vico, Giambattista, 117
Vietnam War, 11, 87, 131
and trauma memories, 139
Washington memorial, 121, 130

Wanner, C., Burden of Dreams, 136
war criminal trials, 147, 148
war memory, 3, 8, 11, 45

and commemorative activities,
127-30, 131, 132

and Protestant-inspired moralism, 72
war memorials, 129-30
War and Remembrance in the Twentieth
Century, 129

Watergate memories, 71-2, 79

Weber, M., 4, 44
Whyte, H., 102
Wickham, C., 55, 137
Winter, J., 106, 127-8
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,
128,131

women, and generational memory, 90
Woolf, Virginia, 116
working-class memories, 137
working-class tradition, 58-9
World War I, 3, 45, 129
and trauma, 139
World War II

and American memories of Lincoln,
72

and the Birmingham Popular Memory
Group, 63

fiftieth anniversary of, 126-7, 132,
150

and generational memory, 87, 90
and retrospective justice, 147, 148-9
and Yugoslavia, 20
see also Holocaust memory

Yugoslavia, 20, 138

Zerubavel, E., 12, 15

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